Christchurch Daily Photo

This is Manchester Street from near the corner of St Asaph & Manchester Streets. I aimed my long lens through the wire fence. What I noticed immediately was the old Paint Sign on the side of the building. This has been revealed now that the building beside it has come down. See below for a close up of the sign – it was hard to get a better shot due to the cordon.

The statue above is just a few doors along from The Drawing Room on Manchester street but behind the cordon. I can’t remember what was there. Someone has left her standing upright. There’s also rather a high stack of shipping containers being used to protect workers from a building collapse – I can’t work out which building it is. That’s the problem when you can’t get into your central city, your memory starts to fade. There’s talk of running citizen tours through the CBD once it’s safe. Needless to say I’d be one of the first on the bus if I could grab a seat.

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I remember seeing this bridge in the news a lot when the September quake happened last year. I wasn’t sure where it was but accidentally drove past it on my way to a meeting and had to stop for a photo. My GPS (Tom Tom) navigates some funny routes around the city sometimes, so I end up seeing things and finding stuff I didn’t know about or as in this case knew about but was not entirely sure where it was. It’s quite impressive the damage the quake did to this bridge.

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This is the rebuilt pub in Heathcote valley – the original was destroyed a year ago in the first big quake we had. It looks like the builders have tried to maintain it’s look and style and it can’t be far off from opening. I walked past it today and it was a hive of building activity. It’s so good to see things being re-built after so much destruction. If anyone knows when the pub is due to open please leave a comment on the blog post (much appreciated).

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This kind of typifies life in Christchurch now – getting back to every day life – talking on the cellphone and getting to wherever we need to be, while right next to us is the remains (and often not even that) of our broken city.

I personally have been amazed at how I have turned off from a lot of damage around the city (well the parts we can get into for now). It’s become quite easy to drive down the one way streets and not gasp in shock. Though I have to admit to becoming disorientated on a frequent basis as I will be driving along, come to a familiar intersection, and have to do a double take to work out if I really am where I think I am – as buildings are gone – letting in a new vista of other buildings. It’s quite a surreal experience at times!

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I’ve been away for a few days down south – hence the lack of posts. Today I needed to go into town and stopped for a quick photo of Manchester Street. I guess these buildings won’t be here much longer. I was shocked when I stopped at Colombo street – a very large amount of empty space there now. We had two decent after shocks today – a 4.0 and a 4.7 – the first near Lyttelton and the second near Rolleston. Being in Mt Pleasant I felt the Lyttelton one very differently from the Rolleston quake. The ones close by are like ‘boom!’ – smack! everything vibrates – and the quakes further away in the West of the city are more rolling.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been living with quakes for nearly a year, as the one year anniversary of the first big quake is this weekend. I can barely remember how I felt the weeks after the first quake as I think we all thought life was just going to get back to normal fairly quickly (which in many ways it did). But after February and June life has been anything but normal for so many people. So when I now hear of a city somewhere experiencing a big quake, I now know that the after effects linger for a very long time. Yes, my knowledge of earthquakes has certainly been sharpened thanks to direct experience.

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