May 18, 2024
I met up with Mason the other day. He texted the Dhamma group chat asking who was in Christchurch. I said I was.
I met him after finishing at Dimitri’s. He was upstairs having a beer with some friends. I talked with him for about half and hour. It was really nice.
He’d just finished his travels. He was flying back to the U.S. in a couple days. His girlfriend was going back to Germany. I think they were unsure about what would happen next with their relationship. I don’t think they were breaking up.
He had been travelling for the last 2 years I think. He had been in Asia before New Zealand. He’d also travelled around Australia a few years back. He said he was really ready for some stability.
I could relate to that. I told him that I was thinking about going to University. He was really enthusiastic about that. He said that he loved going to college. He had a lot of nostalgia and wished that he could do it again.
I went with Mark and Jayne to Quake City. It’s a museum about earthquakes here in Christchurch. It was pretty interesting. They had lots of debris from the 2011. They also had the spire from the cathedral.
We watched a short documentary featuring interviews with locals living in Christchurch at the time. One woman got caught in rubble and lost her fingers. Another man’s wife was trapped and killed in the CTV building. A cop talked about bringing the prisoners out from their cells and taking them to the river. They met a judge there and held a short hearing for some of the prisoners apparently.
There was a bike that powered a TV or something. Mark hopped on and started pedalling. After that we went to a cafe across the road. We had some lunch. It was beautiful.
Afterwards we ordered a taxi. This man with a giant stomach arrived. He was the first white cab driver we’ve had so far. He car was brand new. He told us he’d just bought the thing for $50, 000. He said he was a bit upset about not getting enough well paying taxi jobs. He was only getting short trips.
He was a bit strange. He was annoyed with how foreigners from Asia were moving to New Zealand and changing the culture. I thought that was strange, considering Europeans did the same thing to the people who were already here.
Then he rambled on about Trump and nuclear war. He was saying that the world would end if Trump got re-elected. He was saying that someone should film a document about nuclear war and send it to the American government. He said he didn’t want to do it, because then he’d get into trouble.
We told Sumit, our main driver, about this guy. Sumit knew who we were talking about. He said the guy was such an idiot. Sumit was mainly referring to the fact that this guy had bought an expensive car for taxi driving.