The Sterks Take on New Zealand! January 3rd 2012

We are here! We arrived bright and early at 5am to be exact in Christchuch New Zealand on Jan 3rd. With nothing being opened at 5am in the morning especially on a holiday (NZ holiday) we quickly rented a car from the airport which we will drive to Auckland (doing a re-location) on the 16th. We headed downtown Christchurch to get a bite to eat and possibly find an internet cafe. We were taken off gaurd immediately. We knew Christchurch had suffered from a serious earthquake in 2009 and even just recently suffered from another but we had not expected to see so much damage.

Seeing so many abandoned homes (some very beautiful) shattered windows, torn up streets and sidewalks, flooding, demolished buildings ad churches etc. Maybe it's being naive, or un-aware, or mainly because we have never been affected by such a disaster(which we know that we are really lucky!) but we felt very disheartened for all these people (whom we don't know) who have had to pack up their lives and leave. We saw the damage first hand and in some instances homes were torn in half with most of the remants and belongings still left inside.

Most hostels and hotels were not accepting customers due to the fact that they were unsafe so we had a very difficult time finding a place to stay for the night. We ended up staying in a hostel called, Point Break, in Brighton just outside the city. Covered in scaffolding on all sides we got a room and relaxed as we had been quite tired since being up for most of the night. The next morning we even felt a mini earth quake- it was a bit scary but it was just small.

Near our hostel you could see the mountains- which were calling our names so the next morning we were off!