Kia Ora!

After so many months of anticipation, we are well and truly in Christchurch, New Zealand, as of Sunday, Feb. 2 (Feb 1 in the US).  Whatever.

The flights were mostly on time, and better yet--uneventful.  We were delayed about an hour in ATL--yes, they will really hold up a plane full of 250 passengers while one (of 6) flight attendants is trying to get there.  She sheepishly boarded the plane to some strong applause and muffled boos--sort of like President Obama being announced for his latest State of The Union Address.

Our layover time in Los Angeles was cut that much short, so we had to hustle-walk past three terminals before getting to our outbound gate--all the time hearing "Please excuse our mess while we make LAX the airport of the future."  Well, guess what?  I went to NZ in 2000 and had to take a shuttle bus that same distance to make my connection in the International Terminal back then.  Apparently, the future is getting further and further behind in LAX. 

But, we made the flight out of LAX on Air NZ, got settled into our seats, had a great meal with unlimited NZ wine, and then let the Attavin do its job to get us to Auckland in what seemed like a 3-hour flight (12, actually).  Once in Auckland we made our connection to Christchurch, and were met by our host Ian Culpan at 9am local time.  We were still excited about arriving and managed to stay awake for a few more hours.  A short nap, a couple more hours awake, and it was time to give in to the jetlag for the next 15+ hours.

We did discover that it was Sunday in NZ when we arrived, not Monday--as we thought all along.  The good news is that we did not miss the Super Bowl on TV here.  The bad news?  You guessed it--we got to see enough of the Super Bowl to wish we hadn't seen any of it.  Adding to our disappointment was that they did not play US commercials during the game here--they played a lot of very lame Kiwi commercials, and even had some dead air when spots were not sold.  The dead air beat the ads, hands down.

Ian has been great to get us situated and officially signed in at the University of Canterbury.  We did a lot of walking around the UC area the last two days, and then were given a car tour of the city and parts of the Banks Peninsula (much more on that in later posts).  Christchurch was hit by a 7.1 earthquake in 2010, which leveled nearly all of the City Centre area and many of the near suburbs, including the UC campus area.  We saw the UC devastation yesterday, but it paled by what happened to the City Centre in about 12 seconds three years ago.  Several dozen people were killed, two beautiful cathedrals were nearly totally leveled, the main rugby stadium has been condemned, and very few buildings over 3 stories are still standing (but not usable).  Some progress towards reconstruction has been made, but the city will never be the same again that I saw in 2000.  The people we have talked with are very thankful that more lives were not lost, and they seem to have accepted that much of their beautiful city will not return in their lifetimes.

We will send some pictures from the Banks Peninsula, once we can get the blog site to upload them for us.

More soon.

Mike and Terry