From May to late September, we lived in Christchurch, in New Zealand's South island.
When we had first arrived in the country at the end of April we had no firm path: we knew we wanted to work, and soon, and we applied to jobs inside and outside the box. Landscape architecture and media jobs yes, but we also began looking into something we'd talked of doing "in the future" - running a hostel.
One memorable day staying with the good sir William Thomas Malcolm in Waiwera, around 40 minutes north of Auckland, we had spent hours and hours trawling the internet for potential next moves. Late afternoon, Chris and Tom went off for a walk but I decided to stick at it. Two magical things happened during the next hour. Firstly, the boys found a dead dolphin on the beach. Chris plucked a tooth from its jaw for me as some sort of depraved love token (to be fair I still have it). Secondly, I found the job, home and pet that was to be ours.
By multiple strokes of luck, on May 21 we took up the positions of managers at an 80-bed backpacker hostel in earthquake-torn Christchurch, living in a lovely sunny apartment and in custody of a crotchety old cat named Buster. Buster grew to love us and we grew to love both him and the sucker-punched city of Christchurch.
Since September 2010 something approaching 12,000 earthquakes have struck there, a significant-enough portion of them serious. The city centre is in shreds, mainly now demolition or building site, and some outlying suburbs are uninhabitable, wracked by drawn-out insurance claims and constant re-assessments of building integrity. It doesn't help that each new 'large' quake has the potential to scrub all previous claims to a structure's safety.
One of the biggest problems, especially in the Eastern suburbs, has been liquefaction. When this word was first explained to me, I found it terrifying. Essentially, during major seismic activity, when the earth is vibrating at a certain frequency the ground can be caused to act like liquid. Stuff sinks. Stuff like houses. The sandy and reclaimed-from-the-sea nature of the ground Christchurch is built on didn't help. So the shakes went down and the mud came up. Tonnes and tonnes of mud.
People also died - 185 in the February 22 quake, which came just 11 days after Japan's. We knew this but the full gravity of it didn't really hit until we visited the then-newly re-opened museum and, particularly, watched CCTV footage from the major quakes and video clips of interviews from people who had been in the city centre at the time.
While we lived there the city experienced about 20 earthquakes each week and Canterbury Quake Live was our most-visited website. Generally we'd actually feel one just a few times each week.
And while Christchurch itself was severely damaged, our work at the hostel was all-consuming: about 13 hours a day, five days a week, and at least one of us needed to stay on-site for the whole of that time. The result was that we didn't fully feel the effects of the city's destruction. We had a brilliant set-up at the hostel and really enjoyed being there - working and spending time - and on the occasion that we did spend a serious amount of time out in the city it was almost novel.
The truth, though, is that Christchurch is not dead. Hell, we managed to fill a whiteboard full of cool stuff to do there five days a week for five months. Nope, Christchurch is still a brilliant place to be. Often called the most English city outside England, it's still got the river and the trees and the green and the shells of some of the older stone buildings. The fragile fragments of its former beauty are still extremely evident, there is still a huge number of cool cafés and bars to go to - you just have to make the effort to go there, and above all there is an incredible atmosphere of strength and regeneration and resilience.
The Gapfiller project is a wonderful crystallization of that feeling - artistic, creative and functional community projects filling the spaces in the streetscape left by demolished buildings citywide. The first one, the Think Differently Book Exchange was a marvellous glass fridge full of books that had changed people's lives and it was right next door to our hostel, on the corner of Kilmore and Barbadoes. I believe it used to be a picture framer's.
And, if you looked, everywhere across the city there were little bits of art, little bits of things to brighten what could easily be an irrevocably depressing sight. One day, walking home from the library, we stopped outside the gutted building that used to be the restaurant Strawberry Fare (which is now in lovely large premises on Bealey Ave and serving excellent food, particularly desserts!) and noticed that, despite the smashed glass and weedy cracked paving stones, somebody had bothered to stack a pile of tiles so they made a gently twisted tower about three feet tall. And on top of that tower, they had stuck a lovely array of plastic animals and toy soldiers. It was so heartwarming to see it could have been a Nativity scene. Yet it was typical of the Christchurch spirit that became so evident once you spent any real amount of time there.
We had a fantastic winter living and working in Christchurch and made some sure-to-be lifelong friends. But with the onset of summer came new and exciting challenges. To be continued!
When we had first arrived in the country at the end of April we had no firm path: we knew we wanted to work, and soon, and we applied to jobs inside and outside the box. Landscape architecture and media jobs yes, but we also began looking into something we'd talked of doing "in the future" - running a hostel.
One memorable day staying with the good sir William Thomas Malcolm in Waiwera, around 40 minutes north of Auckland, we had spent hours and hours trawling the internet for potential next moves. Late afternoon, Chris and Tom went off for a walk but I decided to stick at it. Two magical things happened during the next hour. Firstly, the boys found a dead dolphin on the beach. Chris plucked a tooth from its jaw for me as some sort of depraved love token (to be fair I still have it). Secondly, I found the job, home and pet that was to be ours.
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| A half-decomposed dolphin on the beach near Waiwera, NZ. |
By multiple strokes of luck, on May 21 we took up the positions of managers at an 80-bed backpacker hostel in earthquake-torn Christchurch, living in a lovely sunny apartment and in custody of a crotchety old cat named Buster. Buster grew to love us and we grew to love both him and the sucker-punched city of Christchurch.
.jpg) |
| Demolition work in ChCh city centre. |
One of the biggest problems, especially in the Eastern suburbs, has been liquefaction. When this word was first explained to me, I found it terrifying. Essentially, during major seismic activity, when the earth is vibrating at a certain frequency the ground can be caused to act like liquid. Stuff sinks. Stuff like houses. The sandy and reclaimed-from-the-sea nature of the ground Christchurch is built on didn't help. So the shakes went down and the mud came up. Tonnes and tonnes of mud.
People also died - 185 in the February 22 quake, which came just 11 days after Japan's. We knew this but the full gravity of it didn't really hit until we visited the then-newly re-opened museum and, particularly, watched CCTV footage from the major quakes and video clips of interviews from people who had been in the city centre at the time.
While we lived there the city experienced about 20 earthquakes each week and Canterbury Quake Live was our most-visited website. Generally we'd actually feel one just a few times each week.
.jpg) |
| The hungry dinosaurs of Christchurch. |
The truth, though, is that Christchurch is not dead. Hell, we managed to fill a whiteboard full of cool stuff to do there five days a week for five months. Nope, Christchurch is still a brilliant place to be. Often called the most English city outside England, it's still got the river and the trees and the green and the shells of some of the older stone buildings. The fragile fragments of its former beauty are still extremely evident, there is still a huge number of cool cafés and bars to go to - you just have to make the effort to go there, and above all there is an incredible atmosphere of strength and regeneration and resilience.
 |
| Outside the old Strawberry Fare. |
And, if you looked, everywhere across the city there were little bits of art, little bits of things to brighten what could easily be an irrevocably depressing sight. One day, walking home from the library, we stopped outside the gutted building that used to be the restaurant Strawberry Fare (which is now in lovely large premises on Bealey Ave and serving excellent food, particularly desserts!) and noticed that, despite the smashed glass and weedy cracked paving stones, somebody had bothered to stack a pile of tiles so they made a gently twisted tower about three feet tall. And on top of that tower, they had stuck a lovely array of plastic animals and toy soldiers. It was so heartwarming to see it could have been a Nativity scene. Yet it was typical of the Christchurch spirit that became so evident once you spent any real amount of time there.
We had a fantastic winter living and working in Christchurch and made some sure-to-be lifelong friends. But with the onset of summer came new and exciting challenges. To be continued!
SARAH
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