Canterbury Tales

The drive to Christchurch was, again, too beautiful to read a book or work on the laptop. We arrived in Christchurch, which is in the Canterbury region, on Friday. The streets were hopping with bicycles, tourists, goths, koreans, japanese, americans, brits, city buses, the electric tram... The population here is about the size of Huntsville, Alabama, but the city is so concentrated that city energy is much bigger. Friday through Sunday we stayed at a Holiday Park with showers, a kitchen, and laundry room. We had a frisbee tournament (New Zealand Nationals!) Saturday and Sunday, so a shower was necessary, as well as the washer machine.
Since Monday (now it's Wednesday afternoon) we have been parking outside of a frisbee friend's house at night and parking at the Botanic Gardens during the day (near the city's center). We eat breakfast outside on the picnic table, sometimes for lunch,(although we found that eating at a restaurant at lunch is much less expensive than dinner), and dinner, too.
Today has been a little overcast, but the temperature is nice (~22 celcius). The past couple of days the temp has been the hottest recorded this year in Christchurch.
The street names in Christchurch are English names, like, Worcester, Gloucester... and are pronounced like the New Englander's pronounce them--"Wista", but with the R sound, so, "Wister", and "Gloster". It takes us about 30 min to walk from the van to wherever we are going in the city... So we've been walking alot. Yesterday we visited the history museum and it was soo cool to see the old Maori indian artifacts, the Egyptian mummy, the Antarctic exploration artifacts, bones from the extinct Moa (bird like dinosaur once hunted by the Maori), and "30 Lounges Around the World" (exhibit of 30 different ethnic living rooms that you walk through with your shoes off). Today we plan to visit an art museum and look at some architecture built by the first settlers. So, No Worries Mate! Cheers!