Christchurch impressions

I took some pictures while I was walking around in Christchurch yesterday. Playing around with my camera and trying different things.

 I was walking through the botanical garden here in Christchurch and saw this incredible tree. It was ginormous.

Then I walked closer to downtown. Or what is left of it. Most of the former downtown area is closed off because it is still not safe to walk there because of unstable buildings. But close to that area the people from Christchurch put up lots of shipping containers, painted them in different colors and transformed them to different shops and coffee places. That is a part of Christchurch that I had not seen before, and I think it looks awesome!

While I was sitting in the shade and waiting for one of the Antarctic guys who came on the downtown walk with me to be finished with a pretty long phone call, I jumped on the opportunity to play around with my camera. I had a more or less willing object for my pictures: meet the seagull!  :)
Took about 40 pictures of this pretty bird.

On the way back to the hotel, I saw that ruin that used to be a church. All the windows are out, most of the walls are missing, and it looks only like a skeleton of the former building, but somehow it shows exactly how things are here at the moment...