{"id":1185,"date":"2011-11-05T04:04:44","date_gmt":"2011-11-05T03:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2012-10-24T07:40:34","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T05:40:34","slug":"picking-up-the-pieces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/2011\/11\/picking-up-the-pieces\/","title":{"rendered":"Picking up the pieces"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It was 4:35 in the morning when the ground started shaking. The September 2010 earthquake threw people out of their beds, cracked up roads and made buildings collapse. The Christchurch quake had a 7.1 magnitude and was the strongest one in decades. It became even worse though when on February 22 an aftershock occurred much closer to the surface. Though being less intense on the Richter scale it was much more destructive and deadly. Almost 200 people died despite the city being prepared for aftershocks. Our couchsurfing hosts Sharl and Shul described how they made their way home while chaos broke out in the city. The biggest part of the city centre was destroyed, power outages occured across the city and the feared liquifaction came – a stinky mixture of sewage and sands that flowed out of the wrecked drainage and got pressed out of the ground to flood entire residential areas. <\/p>\n

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Though reaching New Zealand had been such a unique experience for us – a really positive one before we learned more about the long term damage of the earthquake. After all the way through Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Mongolia, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Philippines and Malaysia, it felt like at the other end of the world, behind all the peoples that are very different to Europeans, there is a little island that is just like home (though more like our British or American ‚home‘ than our German, Israel or France one). The suburbian brick buildings with European-looking people, the square green meadows with hedges around, the houses with driveways and little gardens were the obvious signs. And then the bureaucracy, the cleanliness, the professional service-culture and the „health and safety“ attitude, which apparently was one reason why mass fatalities have been avoided. <\/p>\n

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Sharl & Shul live in Dallington, a part of Christchurch that has been worst hit by the earthquake. Their recently bought home got red zoned and they have to move out by next year. Everything in the area will be demolished and nothing rebuild for the next decade at least. They really had to go through a lot of shit (even literally with half a meter sewage in the whole yard) but still offered to host us. Their last couchsurfer stayed with them in February, exactly when the first terrible aftershock hit and they hadnt had any surfers since. The two really welcomed us warmly, cooked for us (and we for them) and took us to Shul’s concert in a pub. <\/p>\n

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We had a great time and really enjoyed the company of the ever optimistic inhabitants of Christchurch, despite the sad situation in the city where there are more empty plots of demolished houses than buildings that survived the series of shocks.<\/p>\n

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\"Flattr<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was 4:35 in the morning when the ground started shaking. The September 2010 earthquake threw people out of their beds, cracked up roads and made buildings collapse. The Christchurch quake had a 7.1 magnitude and was the strongest one in decades. It became even worse though when on February 22 an aftershock occurred much … Weiterlesen »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,29,28,64,62],"tags":[214,148],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3931,"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions\/3931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruckh.org\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}