How Christchurch people spend a sunny, Sunday afternoon

This afternoon as a family we did the temporarily opened, public walk from Cashel Mall to Cathedral Square. We queued in an orderly line for two to three minutes and then we were past the official clicking off a counter and standing in Colombo Street looking up at Lucy's old school building on the corner of Cashel Street and Colombo. The walkway was lined with fences and busy with people. The crowd was quite chatty and all sorts of ages were there. Christmas Decorations were hanging from the lamp posts.
We walked past buildings that looked so familiar and then there would be a gap of nothing. As we approached the square, the crowd became quiet, I think we were all unsure how we would react.

We walked between the old familiar buildings of the ANZ and BNZ. Many of the glass verandah panes on the BNZ building were smashed and lying in tiny fragments on the ground. The whole building will be coming down in a few weeks.

Entering Colombo St

BNZ building still to be demolished

Then we were into the Square. The paving stones look so normal and the trees and the seats - exactly as they were the many times I had sat on them. But the Cathedral was so smashed. The old Regent Theatre building was completely gone. In the opposite corner I could see just the old wrought iron entrance way to the Warner's hotel - that was all that remained of it now -  behind the cenotaph. The cenotaph looked totally normal, apart from the unmown grass around it.

It was hard to get my head around what happened here, while I was in the suburbs. Lucy was okay about being back in the Square though she had moments of sadness but I think we all did. I ran my finger down the fence to make it feel real, that we were really here and this was what the Square looked like now.

Once in the Square the crowd was quite talkative and it was nice being back there with so many people. There were a couple of older people in wheelchairs, it was almost like the Square of last year on a Sunday.

During the week I saw a headline that read something like - "Familiar sounds return to the city centre". The cathedral bells jumped into my head but then I knew, it wasn't them, they were not coming back for a long time.

That is the thing-  it is so hard to relate the reality of the new Christchurch, with what is still in my head as Christchurch. It is difficult to believe my city has left me rather than me leaving it behind. 

Entering the Square and the

 familiar old Post Office Building

People in the Square - looks almost normal

A post no longer straight 

A view I have never seen 

before as  Chancery Lane

buildings used to be there

City Founding Father - absent

Cenotaph - looking as it 

always did

A Verandah has fallen to be held up a
light, I wondered how many injuries that
light saved

The city was suffering pre Feb 22
Closing down sale

A Summer Sale almost a year on