Workaday in Christchurch

Feb 14, 2011
Surf Sessions = 2

Km Driven = 3970

This was a work day.  George had quite a bit to do and so spent his morning at the library working on architecture projects for two clients; one in Santa Barbara that is nearing a finished design and another in Spokane that is just out of schematic design.  Maia and I went to the square in front of the cathedral in the center of town.  The Neo-gothic stone cathedral was consecrated in 1881.  It has a large rose window and a wooden ribbed ceiling.  Tourists pay $5 each to climb half way up the 63m spire for the view.  Maia and I did not climb it as Maia kept saying, “Not this church, we go to another church.”  She kept repeating that she wanted to see a “different church.” We could not go inside the main sanctuary because of the flower festival which had taken over the church for the week.  We did peek inside the cathedral from inside the base of the spire and saw that the church was festooned with flower displays and very beautiful. 

We spent most of the morning in the square listening to buskers – street entertainers.  This is a very serious business in Christchurch.  The Busker Festival had only just finished the weekend when we first arrived in town. Despite the exodus of the majority of buskers, we did get to hear a gypsy violinist, see a juggler, and listen to a bone flute player who was doing some incredibly fast Celtic reels and singing – he was doing one or the other non-stop for a couple of hours. 

Then we watched the chess players who had both a set with pieces 3 feet tall and many smaller sets as well.  Maia did a lot of dancing around the square and was pretty popular with the tourists herself.  Maybe she should have put out a hat?  Her favorites were the violin player and a bone flute player.

We had lunch with our friend, Chris, at the Christchurch Arts Centre, which sits across from Christ College (a private high school on the grounds of the botanical gardens) and is also built in the Neo-gothic style.   After lunch Maia and George went off to do some exploring while Chris and I went to a meeting.  We met with Graham, a physician who is working on pathways for referral criteria in the Canterbury area.  I have been curious about the healthcare system here and the meeting was pretty enlightening.  They do suffer from problems created by the private sector as well as difficulty with distributing the resources of their private sector and overall it is ½ private and ½ public.  This physician is working with others to facilitate better communication between GPs (general practitioner, which is kind of like Family Practice back home) and the specialists and hospital physicians.  It is a mammoth task that they have been working on for 2 years.  I was impressed by the amount of progress they have made.  I was also grateful to Chris for setting up the meeting.  He is a professor at the University of Canterbury (in Christchurch) and has worked for sometime on mathematical models that can be used in health related issues.  Much of his work has been in the area of diabetes and he is hoping to do more with the physicians working on the larger questions of preventive medicine, impact of chronic diseases, etc.

At the end of the day we headed north to Picton (a few hours drive and located between Kaikoura and Nelson) that night to catch an early morning ferryboat to Wellington on the North Island (an island we are fairly familiar with)!