Christchurch - as it was

  I felt the earthquake on February 22nd and thought it was Luna (the cat I'm now living with) moving the couch, but then I realized she's way too small to move the couch like it was on the ocean.  I felt the house shake and saw the curtains move, but I had no idea what a disaster it truly was until about an hour later when the news started to come in.  
  Since the quake, many people have moved down to Dunedin to enroll their kids in school and to start university.  No one knew if/when the schools would open again.  Some have now, but there's still a lot of clean up needed.  Neighborhoods are still trying to get electricity and plumbing restored, but there is a vast number of people who have just left after having experienced both earthquakes.  The whole thing reminds me a lot of what happened after Hurricane Katrina - so many people displaced and students scattered to the winds...and people being forgotten/neglected in terms of basic human services.  It's really sad to see so many people who have lost everything.  I can't imagine losing everything in my home and losing all my co-workers!  One of the women I work with stated that these things just don't happen here.  They see things like this happen in other countries, but New Zealand has, until now, been spared from large scale tragedy and that's a big reason why this has affected everyone so deeply.  

  When I flew out of Auckland, via Wellington, back to Christchurch, I was completely knackered and didn't know that it was my last chance to see Christchurch whole.  I didn't do much after I checked into Jail again, but I did brave the rain to visit the Art Museum.  They had a special exhibit of Ron Mueck's work.  He's an artisit who specializes in the amazingly accurate detail of the human body and plays with scale at the same time.  His pieces were amazingly detailed and, well, amazing!  Sadly, my words are not quite enough to get across the true "wow" factor his pieces impressed.  His attention to detail, on imaginary people, was incredible.  His 8' tall pregnant woman - he included goose bumps and birth marks, moles and REAL hair.  

After having studied centuries of artists' renditions of newborn babies (i.e. Madonna and child), he wondered why no one ever depicted them accurately - they're NOT cute.  He was first noticed when he unveiled his piece "dead dad", a 3' tall, perfectly accurate sculpture of a dead man.  My personal favorite was the woman in bed.  It was done soooo well and so non-descriptly (is that a word?).  She's just a woman, in a tank top, lying in bed thinking about something.  It's so everyday, but the scale makes it truly amazing.  I LOVED this piece.  And I also thoroughly enjoyed the two old ladies chatting to each other while giving the world the evil eye.  It's the lady's sagging nylons that won me over here.  Seriously, the attention to detail is what makes these impressive.  

He also did a large "mask" of his own face.  You can see all the hair follicles in his beard.  Amazing.  Truly.  Sadly, after I went through the exhibit twice (shocking for me, I tend to have the attention span of a newt in museums), I just meandered around Cathedral Square, hit a grocery store, made dinner and went to bed.
 
  
  The next morning, on my walk to the bus stop to head home to Dunedin, I saw my last glimpse of the old Central Business District.  The CBD has been closed off since the quake and only a few days ago were people finally allowed in to see the damage and get critical items from their offices/businesses.  The city is still in recovery mode more than clean-up mode and the timeline to get Christchurch back up and running is long and expensive.  I wish I had more pictures of the Cathedral, specifically the spire that fell.  You always think you have more time to see things!  You always think that it will be there tomorrow.  It's eye-opening to realize that things can change in an instant and I'm very thankful that I wasn't in Christchurch when this happened, my heart goes out to everyone who died or lost someone in the earthquake, and I will happily remember Christchurch as it was these couple days that I passed through on this summer trip.