Christchurch is a beautiful city, with a lot of beautiful old stone buildings. This picture shows the main cathedral, next to a "The Chalice," (possibly better known as "The Ice Cream Cone").
At breakfast, I ran into Laura Gladstone, a UW (Madison) graduate student on IceCube; she is on her way to the South Pole to test digital optical modules (DOMs). Laura, Thorsten and I then went to the University of Canterbury, where we lunched with the local IceCube group. This is Suruj Seunarine last week there - after 9(?) years he is moving to a faculty position at the University of the West Indies, on Barbados.
After lunch, the main event was our appointment at the Clothing Distribution Center (CDC), where we received everything from long underwear and wool socks to warm parkas and snow goggles. And again, more pairs of gloves and mittens than I knew what to do with - leather mittens, 2 pairs of leather gloves (I gave one back), snow gloves, glove liners.... Since we had to try everything on, this took some time.
Later, Thorsten and I wandered around the Christchurch botanical garden, which is really amazing. Especially the heritage rose garden (below):
There is also a nice display of water plants (below):
We need to be back at the Antarctic center at 6 am tomorrow, for a planned 8:30 (?) departure.
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