Days 37-39: Christchurch

We’ve spent our last few days in New Zealand dealing with logistics, relaxing, and exploring Christchurch. It’s been raining outside most of the time, so we’ve watched a bunch of movies (on demand movies are great!), used the free internet access, and eaten take-away from the near-by Thai and Chinese places. The great www.wotif.com has allowed us to stay at a nice hotel for less than the price of a hostel!

We took advantage of our one afternoon without rain to walk around Christchurch a bit, walking along the River Avon, which circles downtown, and strolling through the beautiful botanical gardens. We also watched some performers at the World Buskers Festival, going on for the second half of January. It’s a very nice city, probably our favorite in New Zealand. It has a very English feel to it, between the architecture, people, and all the rain. It also reminded us a bit of Boston, since the downtown area is quite small, very walkable, and closes early in the evening.

We also spent a lot of time in the great used bookstores here, swapping out all those we’ve finished for new (to us) ones. The book situation is difficult – you can’t carry enough with you to last terribly long, but new books are expensive (in New Zealand they seem to be about twice the price as at home), and used book stores are never frequent enough. Hostels sometimes have book swaps, which are great, but then the selection is pretty bad. Library book sales have been great, since they always have really good prices, but they’re pretty rare. Hunter gave us several books when he left, which have been great, keeping us going through a really dry spell!