November 8 - City Tour

After a surprisingly good night in a room where you can't open a window, but you have a buzzing air conditioner, we had breakfast. Details are unimportant. Just this much: tomorrow we will prepare ourselves a fruit breakfast. We had already seen the destroyed Cathedral of Christchurch yesterday. Today we were in the new replacement cathedral, which was built and consecrated in 2013. The Japanese 'emergency architect' Shigeru Ban designed this church. It is made of cardboard, local wood, steel, and a plastic roof (transparent polycarbonate). It can accommodate up to 700 people and is intended to last at least 50 years. The side walls with offices and toilets are made from shipping containers, which you don't notice at first. One gable wall consists of glass elements (maybe also plastic), on which parts of the photographed old cathedral windows are preserved. The photos show everything quite well.

Right at the entrance, we were greeted by an older gentleman who told us a lot and with whom we had a very good conversation about the church, Germany, English history with its many connections to the German nobility, Queen Victoria and her Albert of Saxe-Coburg, and finally also about the many Chinese visitor groups and their often strange behavior for us Western Europeans. Very nice! In the end, he introduced us to another couple of visitors who came from Austria. We also had a very nice conversation with them. They will start their round trip tomorrow, so we could still give them one or the other tip. Today he celebrated his 70th birthday, which was also the reason for the trip.