It took me a little over 24 hours to find the Louis Vuitton store in Christchurch. Leave it to me!!!
Christchurch, New Zealand has already been great! Yesterday upon landing in NZ, Dr. Blaikie who Trey will be working for picked us up and came with starter groceries that he had bought for us!! We walked around the neighborhood a bit and he took us out to lunch. It was wonderful. Our apartment is nice as well (photos to come in a post very soon!) We are overlooking Hagley Park which is apparently quite impressive to say. It is modern and has a lovely balcony and a den. We are mostly excited about the dishwasher and the washer/dryer in our place!
Today we explored....a lot! We are about 2 blocks from the Christchurch Casino and am sure we will have much to report once we visit that. We picked up some essentials and did a mini grocery shopping. I was excited to learn that they do in fact carry many of my beauty products. As Trey says, he will buy whatever is the least expensive :) I also found the MAC store downtown in Ballantynes (like a Macys or Bergners). It was like a beacon calling to me!
We also looked into getting a mobile phone at Vodafone. There are only two competitors here and NZ is the only country that does not lock their cell phones meaning that you can put a SIM card from another company in and it will work and you can also add a SIM card from another country and it will work. Very cool.
We lunched at a place called High to Hereford which was like a food court with plenty of Asian options, salad places and sandwich shops. These food court type places seem to be quite common here and are different than the US in that they bring your food to you. They sure like to use brie and ham/bacon a lot I am already learning.
Additionally, we checked out the bus depot and purchased our Metro cards. They actually have you register for them with your name/address, etc. which is quite smart - that way, if you load money on it and lose it, you can cancel it like a credit card and they can transfer the loaded money to a new card. The kiwis are a smart lot.
