We have arrived!
We landed in Christchurch after over 24 hours of traveling at 8:30 am yesterday. First off I have to say that one, this place is as breathtakingly beautiful as everyone says and two, the people are very friendly. We took a cab to our rental at the beach and arrived only to find that the keys were not in the lock box as promised. As you can imagine this caused a bit of a panic, but our cabbie, a wonderful Maori guy named Mike, stuck around and let us use his phone to call back to the states to talk to our landlord. Apparently the previous tenant didn't leave the keys but the land lord sent over her cleaning lady asap and we were in business. So much thanks to Mike the cabbie for all his kind help and information, it made us feel very welcome here.
The house is cute and quirky. Celia and Greg were a bit hesitant about it, but after we got our stuff in and settled down we went across the road to the beach and then they were sold on the house choice. New Brighton beach is stunning. A broad expanse of open beach and rolling waves surrounded by distance hills. We played on the beach a while. Celia and I wandering around to find interesting sea shells and Greg went right for the water. I can't explain how wonderful it felt after all we endured for the last two years to see him out there in the surf, happy and playing in the waves. Much gratitude to G-d for granting us this time in paradise and seeing us through to get here. Greg's back held up wonderfully during the trip and we are all doing very good.
After playing at the beach we came back to the house for a while before heading out again to see what resources were near by. Celia and I ventured out to the shopping center a few blocks from here but some one should have warned us about how deceptively strong the Kiwi sun is. Our northern winter fair skin is nice and red with sun burn from our afternoon wanderings and we will not be going out with sunblock from here on out. Aside from looking a bit fried, we had a successful venture out having found a variety of stores, including a good grocery, some familiar food like Dominos and Subway. We returned to the house with pizza and a pre-paid cell for use here and a decent idea of where bus stops and stores are. Unfortunately the internet here didn't work at all yesterday but I woke up at 6am, a lovely side effect of jet lag, to the pleasant surprise of working internet this morning. So I am guessing our internet access from the house will probably be dependent on user traffic and time of the day, so I might be keeping some strange hours to get access. That's ok though, as long as we can get access it's all good.
Some of our first impressions of Christchurch: 1) it's beautiful, lovely plants and flowers abound, the weather is fairly nice, somewhat damp in the morning, warm and sunny in the afternoon though, and the ocean is quite breezy, 2) the people are fairly friendly and helpful, but very quiet and soft spoken. Even in the shopping plaza with people all over it was pretty quiet. 3) Prices at the dairy (what they call convenience stores) are pretty outrageous and we all decided to try our best not to shop there unless absolutely necessary. We'll be fully scoping out the grocery store later today.
Its a strange feeling to be so far away from home, to know you are on the other side of the world, but still see so much that is familiar of home, like food places, tv shows and just life in general. Similar but strange all at the same time. But over all, we are very happy and grateful to be here. We are finding solutions to problems as we encounter them and are grateful to all the help and good luck, which I really think is a lot of G-d looking our for us, that we have had so far. I feel good about being here and think it will be a wonderfully enriching experience for us as a family and as individuals.
I will be posting up some pictures in a little while. It really is visually stunning here and I can't wait to get some art supplies so I can start capturing some of the amazing things I've seen. I've never been big on nature art but everything here so captivates me visually that I think that will change here.
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