Christchurch Day #1

We started our 3 day student trips today! Woohoo!! All 23 of us ended up going to Christchurch for the weekend – it started out with just 3 of us (Bridget, Anela, and me) lol. I think it was because once we 3 decided to go, I made plans set in stone, and since everyone else only had ideas and no solid plans for their trips, they just kind of followed the crowd and went along with ours. Which was fine – I didn’t mind at all. I just think it would have been fun for people to all go to a variety of places so we could all have different stories when we got back. That will be more for the 10 day break I guess.

We got into Christchurch around 2:00 pm and got our 10 bunk room in Stonehurst accommodations – a backpacker’s hostile/hotel. The place had a decent room: the beds were really comfortable, we had a big fridge, and there was internet access and stuff there. But the thing that weirded me out the most was the bathrooms – they were co-ed. And some of the guys there didn’t close the doors when they peed, so I walked in on a guy once cuz the door was cracked and I immediately thought “oh this one’s open.” Nope, got that wrong. Awkward. Oh well, for 2 nights I figured I’ll just have to suck it up and deal with it.

We went out to explore the city for the day. Our group ended up downtown and met up with the other 13 of us. We all hung around for awhile, looked in some souvenir shops, and took a bunch of pictures. Several of us decided to go to the botanical gardens before dinner – they were soo gorgeous! We’re going back tomorrow to take more pics since the sun was setting when we got there.

We ended up meeting up with a bunch of people in the city center and went out to a Mexican restaurant. Since the drinking age is 18 here, some of us girls got a mango-boysenberry margarita – that was good. :)

We’re back at the hostile for the night. The trip’s been really fun so far – people had told me that I had to go to Christchurch when I was in New Zealand, but I just thought it was like an ordinary city. This one has a lot of gardens and old style English buildings and cathedrals, and it’s pretty clean – I like it.

All day here tomorrow – yay!

Leah