1.1.11

Day 34


Rey, Lyris and I went for a walk and and Chinese food at Dim Sum in China Town at the 1st of January.
Poorich from Thailand and Tika from Indonesia took Rei and I on a road trip south of Sydney to Wollengong, love it!

Poorich has friends in a Thai restaurant Andaman so we went there for great food - and a lot of it! :)

31.12.10

Day 33

Rei and I visited her mother's friend Masako and husband Eddie in the suberb Frenchs Forest, northern Sydney. The four of us went swimming at beautiful North Curl Curl Beach.PS I celebrated New Year with Rei's friends Anita, Lyris, Binti, Kash and Putra. We went to Darling Harbour to a club called Pontoon and saw the amazing fireworks (video later)!

30.12.10

Day 32

Rei from Bali, Indonesia is a friend of mine who moved to Sydney to study. I met her when she went on exchange to Aarhus University in Denmark last year. She and her aunt showed me around the city and we had a good time. Later on we went back to Rei's place at Bucknell St. in Newtown where I can stay until I figure out what to do next!


29.12.10

Day 31

When I arrived in Sydney  I met up with Michele and Birgitte from Denmark. UTS (University of Technology, Sydney) in the background!




Day 31

27.12.10

Day 29

Christchurch Art Gallery
I made pancakes!

26.12.10

Day 28

There’s nothing static about Christchurch (link)! I woke up around half past two at night feeling the walls and ground shaking. Before I got out of my bed the shaking stopped. I think I yelled something and then Fabienne, Sam and Eric stood next to me laughing. I asked: “Wow. What’s going on? Was this really an earthquake?” and they answered: “Yep, and you just slept though two other ones at 2am! But we made sure that you and the house were okay”. I was shocked: “What, really!?” We went outside the house for a beer and talked about the earthquakes. I felt so lucky to be surrounded by locals that could tell me that this was quite normal for Christchurch because it is aftershocks from the 7.1 earthquake on September 4. The magnitudes from the three earthquakes was 4.2, 3.8 and 3.7. Throughout the night the aftershocks appeared every half an hour! When I woke up it seemed as if the whole thing was over and I sat down to relax with John at the bench in the garden. Suddenly a much deeper and stronger shaking began and I jumped over to John, grabbed his arm yelling and swearing in Danish while I could see the house shaking from one side to the other! This one was 4.9 and that really scared me...


After the big earthquake (September 4th) the chimney fell down and theese aftershocks only added to the damages of the house. Having my adrenaline pumping through my body every time another aftershock happened I didn’t feel like leaving the house at all. John suggested that we left the center of the city to go tramping in the area of Lyttleton. On our way we saw lots of damage from the earthquake: houses being evacuated, streets closed off, windows broken, bricks etc. fallen down, people and lots of police and firemen on the streets. On the other hand some people were unaffected and went shopping for Boxing Day sales (in the shops that weren’t at risk)

The hostel where I would have stayed was evacuated!

Nice to get away from the earthquakes! Lyttleton is a very interesting region because it’s where the first settlers arrived in Christchurch in the 1840s. We walked the Bridle Path, a historical walk with a view over both Lyttleton and Christchurch.