Our friend Richard was waiting for us at the airport, and after a short drive back to his home, a quick lunch and a badly needed shower (us, not Richard), Richard took us on a driving tour of Christchurch and the surrounding area.
It was a particular pleasure seeing Richard's catering and cafe business, Simply Catering. The cafe is closed down for the summer holiday right now, so we had the run of the entire establishment.
It is a bit strange to leave the Northeastern US where it's the middle of winter, and arrive someplace where they are having summer holidays, but that's the way things roll here in NZ. Kids are out of school right now, many businesses will close for two or three weeks starting around Christmas, and the pace is slower and more mellow than typical.
And it's hot here--it was something like 80-85 degrees F during the day yesterday, and the sun is quite powerful.
So far this trip doesn't quite seem real. Everything seems a little upside down and backwards. But it's probably just the jetlag talking, and the fact that everybody drives on the other side of the road here.
Already, we have a couple of pointers for those of you who might want to travel here:
1) On the plane, don't sit next to a woman with a tubercular-sounding cough.
2) Use drugs to make sure that you sleep on the plane. Our choice: one Ambien, one Tylenol PM and a glass of wine. We were out for at least seven hours of the 12 hour leg from LA to Auckland and it made a huge difference on how we enjoyed our first day there.
More about day 1 shortly...
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