Christchurch

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We get up and it is a beautiful day. Michael runs to Starbucks while I am getting ready. We have a few errands to run today, including finding a travel cover for his backpack. We look on the Internet and find an address for the Osprey distributor in NZ, which just happens to be in Christchurch. The address is on a street a few blocks away from our hotel but in NZ they don’t address number like we do in the US. They simply number the buildings on either side of the street, with odd and even numbered sides, but no block numbers. You may have 262 on one side and 375 on the other side, with no continuity street by street, so we didn’t know how far the address was from our hotel. Figuring we had been pretty sedentary lately and didn’t have much else to do, we set out to find the building. We walked a long way and got pretty deeply into an industrial section of town. We finally got to the address and the building was vacant and listed for lease. There was no sign or moving address. We decided we would go back to the hotel and call the phone number listed on the website although there were no guarantees with that either.
On the way back to the hotel we remembered there was one small area of town where all of the outdoor outfitters were located so we decided to walk down that street and see if anyone carried Osprey backpacks. We passed several smaller outfitters and none of them carried Osprey but thought the large store, Bivouac, down the street was our best bet. Sure enough, we walked in and one of the people there asked if she could help us (they actually do that a lot here). She went right to the item Michael was looking for. It almost seemed too simple. We didn’t want to wait until we got to Auckland, just in case someone had to order it for us. Now we are set to get back to the US.
We left there and walked down the street looking for someplace to have lunch. We found a little bar and ordered our lunch. Michael got a Coruba and Cola, which is a premixed bottled drink of a dark Coruba rum and coke. It is Jamaican rum that is bottled in Auckland. The waitress gave Michael a little card to pull open to see if he had won a prize. When he opened it there was a message to see the bartender to claim his prize. The bartender gave him a nice Coruba hat. It is the second hat he has been given since we have been here. The other one was back in November from the girl at The Mexican Café. They both came from Christchurch.
We went back to our room to check for a message from Tony and Linda about dinner tonight. They were out of town until yesterday and had e-mailed us that dinner would have to be January 5th. We did have a message from Tony that they would pick us up at 1840 (6:40 pm) tonight. Michael was disappointed that the college championship football game between Texas and USC was not on our television and wanted to go see if it was on at the Sports Bar. We walked a few blocks to the Sports Bar and they had it on the giant screen. The game was in the second quarter and Michael wanted to stay and watch it. I went back to our hotel room and copied some recipes from the newspaper into our computer, then took off my nail polish and tried to do something with my nails.
By 6:30 pm Michael is not at the hotel and I am getting a little nervous. I don’t have time to go back to the bar to see if he is still there and I am worried something has happened. I go downstairs to wait outside for Tony to come and I will tell him that I have to go look for Michael. Michael shows up hurriedly and runs upstairs to change clothes. He barely makes it when Tony stops in front of our hotel. The game took longer than expected and was a close game up to the end.
Tony drives us to a restaurant that is located next to the botanical gardens in what used to the curator’s home. It was built in 1920 and was a lovely restaurant, named Curator’s Restaurant. Michael and I had the catch of the day, Tarakihi. It was a white fish, kind of like snapper, and was delicious. We thoroughly enjoyed spending the evening with Linda and Tony and are going to miss them. We all really want to meet somewhere in the world, maybe in the summer, in Europe. Michael and I hope so.

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