Christchurch in more detail

The morning started with the morning service at Durham Street Methodist Church:


which is a typical Methodist preaching box. You can generally rely on Methodists for a good sing and a good cup of tea and this church failed on neither. In addition, the sermon was good too – a study of the story of Mary and Martha and the pitfalls that await those who try to divide people too strictly and create hierarchies.

After the service, I decided to take advantage of the good weather and follow some heritage walks from a booklet I picked up at the i-Site. But first I walked back along to the Arts Centre for some lunch:

This guy:

caught my attention (well, wouldn't he catch yours too?). I'm not sure why he was wearing a kilt as he was 100% Kiwi, but he was very entertaining.

The craft market:

was in full swing again (actually, slightly fuller swing than yesterday) but I resisted the urge to buy even more stuff I haven't room in my bag for.

The walk began At Victoria Square, so I took advantage of my two-day tram ticket to be lazy! Christchurch was planned by the Canterbury Association – a group based in England who envisaged an Anglican community which would essentially reflect British (English, actually) society. The first four Association ships arrived in December 1850. It's hardly surprising, then, to find a statue of Queen Victoria in the main square in front of the new Town Hall:

Neither is it all that surprising to find another statue, this one of Captain Cook:

He did, after all, plant the British flag and claim New Zealand for the British Empire. He wasn't the first European to find the place though – that honour goes to the Dutch (Abel Tasman in 1642) who actually gave the country its name, Nieuw Zeeland, after the Dutch province of Zeeland.

The English feel of the city is only enhanced when you look over a bridge and see someone in a straw boater punting along the river:

A little further along the walk I came across what must be one of the most substantial phone boxes in the world:

Across the river again, this:

is a tribute to fire-fighters around the world. The sculpture is made from steel salvaged from the World Trade Center in New York which was gifted to Christchurch for this purpose. The suspended piece in the middle fell, red hot, from the 102^nd floor of Tower 2, piercing the underlying subway tunnel.

Towards the end of the walk, just behind the Cathedral, are the old Government Buildings – now swanky serviced apartments:

I made a short diversion from the printed route to have a look at New Regent Street. The street is named after the one in London, but it's hard to see why:

What might be interesting is that the two sides of the street are mirror images of each other in terms of architecture and colour. Hey, I only said it might be interesting!

New Regent Street is near the end of the tram's current circular route. I know, circles don't have an end, but the route definitely has a beginning – handily about 20 yards from the side door of my hotel. The line runs through the covered atrium and the terminus is just at the right hand side of the picture:

Back in Cathedral Square, this is called the Chalice and was commissioned to mark the millenium:

Another statue:

This one is of Robert Falcon Scott – the British Explorer who just failed to be the first person to reach the South Pole in 1912. The British love this sort of heroic failure – the carving underneath reads, I do not regret this journey which shows that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another and meet death with as great fortitude as ever in the past, a quote from Scott's diary which was recovered the summer after the exploration party died. The statue was sculpted by Scott's widow Kathleen.

The River Avon seems to be there every time you turn a corner in Christchurch. This bridge, though, is rather different:

It's a monument to New Zealanders who have died in the service of their country in the wars of the twentieth century.

The Antigua Boat Sheds have been here since 1882 and, as well as hiring boats, they house a café which does a nice line in coffee and cats:

The green structure is, unsurprisingly, a heater. The only time this cat moved while I was here was to turn over to toast the other side.

My walk then took me through a corner of the Botanic Garden and I popped back into the Museum to have another look around.

I came across this:

Not very impressed? Well how about a bit closer:

Still not getting it? How about if I tell you that the orange ball is part of a scale model, and that that model is in Kent, England? Well, I thought it was interesting. The model is one of the solar system and was built in the village of Otford to mark the millennium. In the model, Pluto is about 1 km away from the Sun, and the earth is 2.5mm across. Recently, four of the nearer stars have been added, keeping the same scale of 4,600,000,000:1. This star is Ross 154 – the other three are in Sydney, Los Angeles and the Falkland Islands. Which makes it more or less the biggest model possible, I'd have thought.

By now, the museum was closing, so I jumped back on the tram and rode it right round and back to the Cathedral. I was just in time for a service – Choral Evensong in the High Anglican tradition. The normal Cathedral Choir is on holiday, but their stand-ins, the Cathedral Singers, performed very well. This sort of elaborate ceremony is something I like from time to time and something I missed in Amsterdam. The service was part of a series that the Cathedral have been holding on the theme of Taking the Bible seriously, not literally. It was the title, that I noticed on an agenda yesterday, that attracted me in the first place.

The sermon this time was on Lectio Divina, the art of sacred reading. It was an excellent sermon and much longer than one usually gets at Evensong. The thrust of the series is to encourage people to actually think about the Bible, rather than just swallowing it. This evening, the preacher (the Dean of the Cathedral) suggested three stages to fully get the meaning of a passage of the Bible:

• Read it
• Pause to listen to the still small voice, that Elijah wrote of, the soft murmuring of God. What is he really trying to say to you?
• Contemplate the passage quietly. Ponder it in your heart, as Mary did.

The Dean included a good long period of silence to allow us to put line three into action. Again, this isn't common in any Anglican service, but it seemed to work very well in this evening setting.

The closing hymn was The Day Thou gavest, Lord, is ending. I know that the Greenwich meridian is a purely artificial construction, but it seemed more immediate, somehow to sing this hymn in what is basically the first time zone. The sun that bids us rest really was waking my friends in Amsterdam. The day begins here and rolls onward across the planet. Evening services were something else I missed in Amsterdam; there's a special quality to worshipping when it's dark outside, when it's time to contemplate the events of the day in the quiet of a church.

Well, it works for me anyway.

I'm not sure what internet access I'm going to have for the next couple of weeks so updates may be less frequent and shorter. Lucky you!