Sunday, November 27, 2011

How Christchurch people spend a sunny, Sunday afternoon

This afternoon as a family we did the temporarily opened, public walk from Cashel Mall to Cathedral Square. We queued in an orderly line for two to three minutes and then we were past the official clicking off a counter and standing in Colombo Street looking up at Lucy's old school building on the corner of Cashel Street and Colombo. The walkway was lined with fences and busy with people. The crowd was quite chatty and all sorts of ages were there. Christmas Decorations were hanging from the lamp posts.
We walked past buildings that looked so familiar and then there would be a gap of nothing. As we approached the square, the crowd became quiet, I think we were all unsure how we would react.
We walked between the old familiar buildings of the ANZ and BNZ. Many of the glass verandah panes on the BNZ building were smashed and lying in tiny fragments on the ground. The whole building will be coming down in a few weeks.
Entering Colombo St
BNZ building still to be demolished
Then we were into the Square. The paving stones look so normal and the trees and the seats - exactly as they were the many times I had sat on them. But the Cathedral was so smashed. The old Regent Theatre building was completely gone. In the opposite corner I could see just the old wrought iron entrance way to the Warner's hotel - that was all that remained of it now -  behind the cenotaph. The cenotaph looked totally normal, apart from the unmown grass around it.

It was hard to get my head around what happened here, while I was in the suburbs. Lucy was okay about being back in the Square though she had moments of sadness but I think we all did. I ran my finger down the fence to make it feel real, that we were really here and this was what the Square looked like now.
Once in the Square the crowd was quite talkative and it was nice being back there with so many people. There were a couple of older people in wheelchairs, it was almost like the Square of last year on a Sunday.
During the week I saw a headline that read something like - "Familiar sounds return to the city centre". The cathedral bells jumped into my head but then I knew, it wasn't them, they were not coming back for a long time.
That is the thing-  it is so hard to relate the reality of the new Christchurch, with what is still in my head as Christchurch. It is difficult to believe my city has left me rather than me leaving it behind. 


Entering the Square and the
 familiar old Post Office Building
People in the Square - looks almost normal

A post no longer straight 
A view I have never seen 
before as  Chancery Lane
buildings used to be there

City Founding Father - absent
Cenotaph - looking as it 
always did


A Verandah has fallen to be held up a
light, I wondered how many injuries that
light saved
The city was suffering pre Feb 22
Closing down sale

A Summer Sale almost a year on


3 comments:

Sweetp said...

Having a little weep. Thanks for sharing.

Fiona S said...

It is still so unreal. I had a wee cry the other week -sometimes it just gets too much seeing so much of the city being pulled down.

Sweetp said...

Yeah, I think being removed from it now you tend to put it all out of your mind. Then you get these sudden reminders when you see photos or watch footage. I sometimes have little PTSD flashbacks about it all when I try and explain to ppl (useless exercise in itself). Stay strong xx

5 Favourite Sights Seen

  • 1996 Watching tropical lightning turn night to day, outside a little wooden church in a small village in Sabah.
  • 2004 Flying down the Rainbow Valley at 8000ft in a cessna on a clear blue day.
  • 2003 Seeing and hearing Michael Schmacher rolling out of the pit garage in his Ferrari in Hungary.
  • 2009 Chancing upon 100 or more dolphins just off the Kaikoura Coast swimming around, jumping out of the water, doing somersaults and generally having fun.
  • 2006 Finding a pool at the bottom of a waterfall in the bush at Kaikoura that was full of playing baby seals.