One week in

Good news! There hasn't been an earthquake big enough for me to feel in, like, a whole day. Progress!

Remember how I said I was all jittery about taking this trip, and I couldn't really explain why? I wonder if maybe all this earthquakeyness is why. It really kind of makes you think about what you want out of life, and what you don't. For instance, when there was an earthquake while I was sitting in the food court at the mall eating mango curry, I thought to myself how much I didn't want to die eating mall food court Indian food. You can see how that sort of thing can be extrapolated out.

There is a zoo across the street, which is cool. I have never lived across the street from the zoo before. We bought a season pass because it was basically the same price as two visits would be, and I have to take Marlo back there every day until I convince her to ride the donkey. She has to ride the donkey because, alas, Mama is over the maximum allowed height for donkey rides. Apparently this zoo is sort of the ghetto zoo, because everyone keeps asking us why we didn't go to the other one. Does the other zoo have a pool full of disgusting eels to which you can feed cat food off a spoon? I didn't think so.

They are obsessed with eels in New Zealand. It is probably the strangest thing about this place. There is an aquarium that advertises nothing else but that they have a 150 year old eel that is fed at 10, 12:30, and 3 daily. You can bet that I am going to plan my whole day around that schedule. First and foremost, I intend to find out exactly how they know this eel is 150 years old. Next, I want to see if it is REALLY huge and disgusting or just slightly more disgusting and large than the rest of the eels. Does it lift its giant disgusting eel mouth out of the water when it sees the spoon coming, like the ones at the zoo? Does it eat cat food, or does it have to eat something more substantial - or even a special geriatric diet? See. Many questions that must be answered.

Ooh! Almost forgot! Are there giant 150 year old eel souvenirs to be purchased? If there are t-shirts, I have friends in Tampa who are exactly the type of people who would be delighted to find one in their mailbox.  Which is why I love them.

AC/DC jokes will get you fired for life

At about 10 pm on January 1st, I felt my first earthquake of the trip.  And then I felt about a billion more.  Between midnight and 8am we had 21 of them, including two over 5.0 on the Richter scale. By noon on the 2nd the Christchurch area had experienced 36 earthquakes over the first 36 hours of 2012. There were 44 of them between 7pm on the 1st and 7pm on the 2nd.

welcome to my nightmare

 

 

The first quake that woke me up around 1:30 in the morning was a big one, loud and violent. By the time the adrenaline wore off and I was able to fall back asleep, there was another one. And another. And another. Now, I'm a 4th generation California girl and a west coast lifer, so I'm not afraid of earthquakes. I am used to them as a constant threat. But let me tell you, that night was absolutely terrible. By the time we had the 5.48 magnitude quake at 5:45 in the morning, I was in tears. My first night in a new place after 24 hours of travel with the baby, and my husband in Antarctica? I didn't have a whole lot of coping power left in my nervous system.


I've already waited too long to write about this. I have lost the visceral recall, the way you do with childbirth and other traumatic events. It was so stressful for so long. The trouble with earthquakes is that you can't tell how bad they're going to get when they start. Every time you get a new one, there is the possibility it's going to be a bad one. You can hear these quakes before you can feel them, and I have become highly attuned to the sound. It makes me sick to my stomach.


It's been a relatively quiet couple of days on the seismic front, and we've been lulled into a false sense of security again. We had a 4.8 this morning, the first one over 4.0 in over 36 hours. DO YOU HEAR HOW CRAZY THIS SOUNDS? It's been 36 hours since we last had a significant earthquake and I'm telling you it's calm. But this is reality in Christchurch, and it has been since September 2010. They have had almost 10,000 earthquakes over the last 15 months. People are packing up and leaving town. I can't say I blame them - I have reserved the right to leave early if things get bad again.


If you're interested, you can follow the Christchurch earthquakes here and here. Or search for the hashtag #eqnz on Twitter.