Sunday in Christchurch

Eating a New Zealand hot dog

Today we went into the city of Christchurch to the local market, the Botanic Gardens and the Canterbury Museum.  We first stopped at the Riccarton market.  This is a market that local people visit, not tourists but is always one of our favorite things to do on a weekend.  We saw people selling secondhand things, food, fruits, flowers, eggs, handmade things, toys and fleece things.  We bought some second hand books for my sister and I to read.  I like to read some New Zealand books called the Fabulous Five. I also bought a soccer ball so I could play with my mom's students.  We also had some fresh, hot mini donuts that they cooked in front of us and my sister and I got a New Zealand hot dog.  A New Zealand hot dog is different from what they call an American hot dog.  An American hot dog is on a roll but a New Zealand hot dog is more like a corn dog.  It is on a stick and they dip it in tomato (toe- mah- toe) sauce.  It was yummy and I ate the whole thing!

Talking with a lady who was spinning wool and selling her crafts at the market

At the museum we saw moa birds that looked somewhat like an ostrich.  We also saw Antarctic tractors, an old snowmobile and a display of all the whales that live in the Antarctic Circle.  Then we saw not one but two… MUMMIES!
After that we walked down to the Avon River which flows through the city and had lunch at the Antigua Boat Sheds which are very old and survived the many earthquakes here well.  They rent kayaks here and take people out punting on the Avon.  Do you know what punting is?

The main entry to the cathedral.  The stained glass is gone.

After lunch we walked down to Cathedral Square to see how things looked.  The city was devastated
 by 4 major earthquakes in 2010 and 2011.  I'll tell you more about earthquakes here later but the biggest earthquake occurred in on February 22, 2011 and was a 7.1 on the Richter scale.  183 people died in that February quake.  It happened just a few weeks after we left New Zealand earlier that month.  The cathedral is devastated.  The whole front has collapsed leaving only the doors and the door frame behind.  The tower is completely gone as well.  My sister and I danced to a band playing on the steps in front of that cathedral just a few weeks before it collapsed in the quake.   There are many empty lots in Christchurch where collapsed and damaged buildings have been cleared but nothing has been built yet.

The steps that my sister and I danced on don't even exist anymore

We finished our day in the Botanic Gardens where my sister and I climbed trees, looked at types of trees and even saw a California Redwood tree.  We played in a fountain that you could control yourself and climbed a tree one last time before I swung down and we all got back on the bus to head home to Lincoln.