Today I took Minnie and Jackson to register with the library local to the house we’re buying.  I am trying to get a feel for the community we will be living in, making sure we’ll fit in.  I realised it’s actually the small things that help you to feel comfortable in a community. We were crossing the road to get to the library and as we waited at the lights and the green man appeared, the little old lady stood next to us, took Minnie’s hand and guided her across the road.  And Minnie held her hand all the way.  That to me, says we’ll like this community. So even though there are bumps from liquefaction caused by the earthquakes at the end of our road and some of the houses on nearby streets are a little scruffy I think, I can live here, because there are little old ladies who take your child by the hand and make sure they get to the other side safely. As I write this I also think, choosing …

In New Zealand there is a Bank Holiday for Anzac Day (their version of Remembrance Day).  And it is a holiday that falls on the date rather than the day, which sucks if it is a Saturday or Sunday because they don’t “carry it over” to the following Monday.  Thankfully this year was a Wednesday so Gareth got a cheeky day off in the middle of his second week of work in Christchurch. We weren’t sure how the day goes for locals, i.e. did they have a sombre day of reflection?  We went to the beach with some friends. There were New Zealanders there so hopefully our day of fun wasn’t being hideously disrespectful.  Even though it’s their Autumn now the weather is warm and sunny so the children just ran around the whole time and I crouched under a sun tent feeding my 10 month old happy. Now that we have the children in bed and I am sitting on the couch drinking a cider, I can reflect and remember what generations before us …

Last night Gareth and I watched the DVD, “When A City Falls” which basically tells the story of Christchurch’s earthquakes. It’s very simple and real.  You get a good insight into how people were effected, which really is the story you want to learn when you move to the city. We wander on Sumner beach like the picture below and you get no notion of what Christchurch citizens lived through. You realise why people are selling their houses and moving North.  If you experience a 7.1 in the September, dust yourself off, mend what’s broken, celebrate a Christmas, see a New Year in and then wham get thrashed (literally) by a 6.3 in the February you are going to really struggle to forget and just carry on life as normal.  If it were me I would be always suspicious, always thinking about the chance of another, working out the odds of whether I’d fair as well as the last time.  I’d want to leave to. I still haven’t even felt a tremor so I have …