We spent a couple of days here. It is a nice town, with still a lot of restoration going on from a earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 that destroyed 80% of the city, over 1,200 building and damaged more.
This display was commissioned for the millennium celebration. When done it was filled with New Zealand flora
They have many murals around town. A lot of building walls were exposed when the building next door collapsed. The city commissioned murals to be painted on many of them to help make the city look brighter
They literally are rebuilding their city
The Avon river runs through the city and they have created a great deal of green space
The older building that survived or have been restored sit next to more modern building
They had some glorious sunsets we could see from our hotel level.
To get an overview, we took the trolley tours
They are all old time tram/trolley cars, most from Australia
They were founded during the Victorian age
This area is representative of the type of building that were originally built in the town
Several were destroyed , but many still are being restored
The government has spent over 200 million dollars to restore some of the public buildings
This is a boys boarding school that has 600 students.
This is their arts center. Around the back you can see where they still are working on the restoration
This is Victoria Park in honor of Queen Victoria. The guide said many statues fell and were seriously damaged, but the statue of Queen Victoria did not even move a centimeter
Here is the back of the arts center, you can see all the work they are finishing. These old building that are being restored are being done from the inside out to make them more safe if another earthquake happens again.
We took a walk through their botanical Gardens. The river serpentines through it. The far bank was filled with daffodils
Lots of families were out enjoying the weekend in the park
It is spring and the trees were budding out
The colors with the early flowers was uplifting
And the Japanese Cherries were in flower, but no parrot picking the flowers and throwing the down.
Here is an example of housing prices around the area, these stared at 650,000+ and went up quite steeply
So many blocks are still being rebuilt
They are working still to rebuild the cathedral
This build was made as an interim church while they were repairing the old one
It is had been made with a great deal of recycled cardboard. Here is a link about it.
It is really quite impressive
This is the sign in front
The hotel on the far left is where we stayed while in Christchurch, the Ibis
Glass and steel building are prevail nowadays as they rebuild as it did best during the earthquakes, the forefront buildings our old ones and the back buildings newer ones
They have several of the main shopping areas as primarily pedestrian walkways with only trolleys allowed through them.
The morning we head out, we had time to visit one of the museums
They had furniture from the time the town was first built
As well as life size replicas of streets as they used to be
I stopped off in the third floor cafe for a cup of tea and looked out into the garden. Yes that is snow on those spring flowers
The notable thing that happened while I was sitting drinking my tea, was the fire alarm sound and the building was evacuated. I don’t know what happened but outside of some fire trucks and people milling around, nothing looked out of place from the street when we boarded our bus. I will next be telling about the day from Christchurch to Omarama.
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