A whirlwind trip to Christchurch

A few months back we found out that Courtney Barnett, who is one of my favourite musicians was going to be doing a New Zealand tour! If you haven't heard of her before you should go and do that now because she's amazing.
Unfortunately she was playing a super small venue in Wellington and tickets sold out so quickly and I was pretty sad. All the tickets for her Auckland show were gone too so we couldn't fly up to Auckland to spend the weekend with Conor and Sue. There were some tickets for her Christchurch show though and Rich said - "well I guess we are going to Christchurch then" - sometimes Rich is the best (actually most of the time Rich is the best).

I had been to Christchurch a couple of times since the Canterbury Earthquakes, once to fly out to Kuala Lumpur where I met up with the lovely Helga for brunch and the  other time was for a conference. Rich hadn't been back since we had come home from Korea! Unfortunately as we were really only in the city to see Courtney Barnett we didn't have much time to look around but we did our best.

Our hotel was on Cashel Street (well its now the only hotel on Cashel Street) so we decided to visit the container mall for some breakfast.

After breakfast we decided to take a walk along the Avon River and finally landed at Cathedral Square.

There was some pretty cool street art around Cathedral Square - I loved these old Star Wars toys at full size (well at least my size).

This was the first time I'd really seen the cathedral since the earthquakes and even though I've never lived in the Christchurch or the South Island it made me so sad to see it like this. I remember last time we visited Rich and I walked the stairs to the top of the spire.

We seen a huge crane pulling apart this building near the cathedral - it was kind of incredible to see. The crane was a bit like some kind of modern day dinosaur eating a building.

There seemed to be a few art installations near the building like these giant chairs covered in AstroTurf.

I was pretty into this "Dance-O-Mat" add your device to a spot inside the washing machine and get your groove on!

Next up was New Regent Street - I love all the buildings here, they are just so pretty.

At one end of the street was this tiny garden, complete with a mirror for selfies (that's what mirrors are for right?).

I really wanted  to go and check out the Linwood Cemetery (I think that's what its called) so we walked there from New Regent Street. As you walk around the city you can still see a lot of damage from the earthquakes, there's still a lot of work to be done.

The cemetery has quite a bit of earthquake damage, but there are much more pressing things right now that repairing the cemetery. I hope at some point it will happen though.

After a walk around the cemetery we walked into town and had a bit of a break for lunch at a Mexican food truck. I was pretty into the truck itself and all the street art in the area.

After lunch we decided to jump on a bus and head our to The Tannery, it wasn't so much for the shopping but to check out the buildings. I did have to make a brief stop at The Fabric Store though (obviously).

After returning to town, we kind of collapsed for a while back at the hotel, as per usual we did too much exploring for one day. However, we decided to talk a walk in Hagley Park before heading off to the show.

To finish up, here's some more art and some installations (although one is really just an urban garden) that we saw around the city which I took a liking too. Thanks for a rad weekend Christchurch!