This is the Cathedral in Christchurch. It is a fine old church, and although it looks small in the picture, it is really quite large (compare it to the size of the people). It is typical of the style of a fair number of other "fine old buildings" in town. What is currently the Arts Center, the Museum, and what I can only assume is the Canterbury School (for boys), as well as several others, are all built to match. I wandered around the main square of the boys school. They were all wearing coat and tie (black and white), some jackets very jaunty with thin white stripes every 2 inches (how cricket, old chap). Did I feel out of place? Not a bit! I'm sure they were envious of my California Casual!

The Museum was very interesting. Instead of the usual displays, they had organized it as the main street of the town. You could look into the windows of the ironmonger, the cobbler, the hatter, and so on, and get a much better impression of what Christchurch was like a century ago than you might expect. I suppose it worked so well because the objects were grouped together in the order in which we are used to seeing them.

The other good exhibit was the Antarctic display. They had history and artifacts from all the historic antarctic explorations (both successful and otherwise). The first sledges were pulled by ponies wearing little snowshoes. That didn't work. Next they tried people with no luck. Finally they stumbled on dogs. (The Eskimos could have told them that!) In later days they finally using snowmobiles, but judging from the prototype snowmobile, it probably had some failures too. Since I was only in town for one afternoon, I know that there are lots of other things to see. However this is geographically one of the duller areas in New Zealand, so I wouldn't want to spend too much time here.

Possible rumor: I think I overheard a guard at the museum say that the original inhabitants of New Zealand were the Moa Hunters. They were later conquered ("Completely wiped out") by the Maoris, who were then "conquered" by the Europeans. This would explain the sudden artistic change noted in postcard 2, but I don't believe it yet.