Thursday evening. We are sitting on the deck at the backpacker we have been staying at for the last week, eating cheese and butter sandwiches along with sauteed onions and steamed broccoli and spinach. The last few days have been busy; we’ve managed to set our itinerary for our big tickets with the travel agent, lose (and subsequently find) my credit card, go out dancing with some fellow Polies (we learned the Lindy Hop, and what we lacked in skill we made up for with jumping), and bought two cheap bikes and a tent. That’s our plan for the next week or so, to bike around the South Island at whatever pace we want, and set up camp whenever we’re tired.

I packed up the last of my leftover South Pole stuff and sent it off via the APO at the Clothing Distribution Center here, so we’re now down to our traveling weight – a backpack each, and a mostly empty shoulder bag. Kiell went to the Centre of Contemporary Art for the day, a gallery with modern local art packed closely into sliding metal frames. It’s been drizzly and damp here, so we’ve been hoping that things will clear up in time for us to head out by bike tomorrow. We’ll wake up early and head over to the travel agency to buy our tickets, and then we’ll be off!

We’ve put up an album of pictures from Christchurch, you can view it here: http://picasaweb.google.com/mradyfist/Christchurch#

We have been relaxing a lot and spending most of our days wandering around the Cathedral Square area of Christchurch, the center of the city from which all the streets seem to extend like spokes on a bike wheel–having coffee and pints and fish and chips, and running into Daniel’s friends from South Pole. In the square during the day there is a smallish market where you can buy roasted nuts and Souvlaki, greenstone jewelry in traditional Maori shapes, commercial alpaca and sheepskin clothing, and All Blacks rugby accesories. It’s a pretty hippie-friendly city and there are street musicians, jugglers and fire-throwers performing in the city center, as well as lots of tourists from all over the world. We’ve met people in our hostel from Germany, Sweden, Argentina, Ireland and Canada.

Daniel and I spent our first full day together visiting the Botanic Gardens– a very large free garden that, according to the guidebook, has over 10,000 species of plants. There are some beautiful, ancient-looking cypress trees, Cinderella colored hydrangea puffs and lots of great smells. Coming from frozen Minnesota and even-more frozen Antarctica, the flower scented air is a very welcome change, and it’s not just in the Botanic Gardens, but all over the country as far as I can tell from the places I’ve smelled so far. The next day we napped on the bank of the shallow Avon river, eating cheese sandwiches, getting slightly sunburned and watching the suspendered punters push their tourist filled, flat-bottomed boats up and down the river for hours.

Daniel, Maggie, Nicole (a friend of Maggie’s from UMD who now lives in Auckland) and I spent the weekend together. We visited the Christchurch Art Gallery, home to some great Kiwi and international art, as well as the impressively large Canterbury Museum which had a really great section on Antarctic history and some very interesting artifacts from past explorers. We spent Valentine’s day on the beach. It was a little chillier and overcast than we had hoped, but still beautiful, and we still got to wade in the ocean and wander out onto the New Brighton pier. On the pier we watched recreational crab fishers pulling up their catches, and we accidentally crashed a wedding photo shoot before getting back on the bus to return to our backpacker in the center of the city.

We are hoping to acquire bikes and head out to go camping in Akaroa in the next few days to see the countryside.