Christchurch

Since we had an hour and a half less to travel, which seems like all the time in the world, we woke up and checked out right when we were supposed to. Once again, we were hungry. Well, I'm always hungry so we walked across the street from the hotel to grab some grub. In the display windows were...? You guessed it! More meat pastries. Chicken pies, Beef (Steak) pies, sausage rolls, quiches of all sorts... blah blah blah blah blah. You name it. If it was a pastry with meat, there it was. :( I looked to the back wall and ordered myself a small loaf of cheese frenchbread. This was by far the best breakfast move I've made for the whole trip. :P

Anyway, moving on... We drove the hour and a half to Christchurch and checked in but our room wasn't ready. (Brainfart for Chris. My turn.) Cathedral Square, their city center is nearby so we went there to look around and get some lunch. We were thinking cheap so we went to their food court for some Japanese udon and donburi. The parking space was only for 2 hours so we couldn't do much shopping but we got a sense of what was around.

There's a big botanical garden on the map close to the 'centre' so we went there. Turns out that its free parking until 9pm. I think its supposed to be '180' minute parking but it didn't seem like it was regulated very well. We walked around the gardens for a while looking for the famous NZ silver fern. We saw lots of ferns but we're not sure if we found it. They had a beautiful rose garden outside and an indoor rose garden but they were tubulous roses. Very big blooms. We have pictures. Smelled wonderful.

After a few hours in there we headed over to the museum at the edge of the gardens. Lots of Moari history and NZ history as well. We're getting very cultured on this trip. Walked through some souvenier shops and did some shopping in town. It was an overcast day which turned windy at night. There's a big square with old stone building that they've converted to an art center. With our luck they closed at 5pm, so we couldn't go in, just walk along the grounds.

Our growling stomachs brought us to Tokyo Gardens. We were in the mood for sushi. I guess chicken sushi is big around here. It was at the food court and at this restaurant as well as in Auckland. We had the day's special of sushi and sashimi. The chicken roll was... interesting. I probably wouldn't order it again. The rest was yummy. Too bad for me they had 2 oysters laying all over the sashimi, so I had to pick around it in order to prevent an allergic reaction. Chris said they were tasty.

That was about it for our first day in Christchruch. We're here for 2 nights, then off to Queenstown for 3 nights which is the last leg of our trip. The South Island has a lot more hills and rivers than the North Island. The North had many more pine tree farms than the south. The South is more like the hills on the way to SLO or Murrieta, brown everywhere. We saw some deer farms as well as tons of sheep, cows and wineries. Its colder here too. =/

Tomorrow we're checking out the Antartic/Aquatic Center. They're supposed to have live Kiwi birds too. We'll let you know how it goes.

Wiper count: 34 and 1