Aquinoe

Most of the people reading this will know about the Aquinoe Learning Centre Charitable Trust, so I thought this blog might be a suitable place to publish the latest news. Aquinoe has been incredibly lucky and received a donation of £5000. This is from a company that donates regularly to charities each year before Christmas. The employees are each given a chance to nominate a charity. This year a friend of Linda’s (fellow trustee), nominated Aquinoe, and Linda has just received the cheque. Wow! We are so grateful for the generosity of the company, especially at this time of economic problems.
Jean

Christmas Carols in the cathedral

We turned up at the cathedral this afternoon, ready to look round, but were treated to a session of carols from the boy choristers instead. It was so lovely that we forgot to look round afterwards!

Jean

New Regent Street

Yes, there’s one here in Christchurch, but it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the London version. It’s a narrow pedestrianised street (apart from the trams, that is) with some lovely “Spanish Mission” architecture on show. I wrote a piece on the buildings in Napier a few weeks ago, as the town really pushes its Art Deco buildings. In fact, Dunedin, Ashburton and Christchurch all have some beautiful exteriors too.

Jean

Cycling in Christchurch

Dave hasn’t hired a bike for quite a while now and has really been missing his exercise, so he decided to try and cycle off on this penny farthing from the museum this afternoon!

Jean

Trams

This is our mode of transport around Christchurch City centre for the next two days. It has about a dozen stops at various key places like Cathedral Square and the pass is valid for 48 hours.

Full commentary from the driver on the first tram who sounded like Hillary Clinton. Second one more reticent but we learnt quite a lot, not least that Captain Scott would stay in the city in a particular hotel when on his way to Antarctica. Near the river there’s a fine statue of him done by his widow who must have been a sculptress. Dave

Punting

Christchurch seems fond of its British heritage and all the street names are familiar, Even the river is called the Avon and punting is common.

This particular one is loaded with Japanese tourists. It was taken from the city’s Botanic Gardens where we had a 90-minute guided tour with an excellent former teacher called Daphne. We were in fact the only ones there so we got some personal tuition. Dave