{"id":118,"date":"2008-10-06T07:29:10","date_gmt":"2008-10-06T07:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/?p=118"},"modified":"2008-10-06T07:29:10","modified_gmt":"2008-10-06T07:29:10","slug":"sunday-21st-september-to-monday-22nd-september-christchurch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/?p=118","title":{"rendered":"Sunday 21st September to Monday 22nd September &#8211; Christchurch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the Sunday I got up and headed to the craft market at the Arts&#8217; centre that my taxi driver had recommended to me the previous day.\u00a0 It was quite funky with the usual offerings of tarot readings and horrible, knitted woollen hats.\u00a0 There were some other more interesting additions like New Zealand jade and a ridiculously young pair of jugglers as well though.\u00a0 After pottering around Christchurch during the day I headed out for a couple of beers in the evening.\u00a0 Unfortunately the &quot;quiet pub&quot; I picked was actually about the only place in the whole city which stayed open late and before long I was talking to people and my couple of quiet drinks was not so quiet.\u00a0 The place was called &quot;The exchange&quot; and was so-called as there was a computerised stock exchange type set up with the drink prices going up and down all night.\u00a0 It was a novel idea but must have got slightly annoying for the bar staff as people stood there gawping trying to figure out if they should really substitute their Pino Grigio for a GnT based on the price varying by some negligible amount.\u00a0 One girl I met was truly insane and was called Ruwa.\u00a0 I made the mistake of actually replying to her on more than one occasion and she seemed to think that this was an invitiation to talk to her.\u00a0 After a rather longer night than I had initially hoped I headed back to my hostel.<\/p>\n<p>The following day I organised my next relocation and pottered around the centre of town.\u00a0 I decided that (no libel cases or the like here please) Christchurch was full of weirdos.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure there are a lot of lovely people that live in the city, it&#8217;s just that, for the duration of my time there, I managed to meet the people who were, erm how should I put this&#8230;.Special?!\u00a0 On more than one occasion I was randomly shouted at by people in the street.\u00a0 Nothing offensive, just strange things and on another a guy clearly on something followed me from place to place.\u00a0 Again this was not offensive or even particularly worrying, just very strange.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know why but the place did have a strange feel about it.\u00a0 Apparently the whole city was built on a swamp, so maybe that had something to do with it.\u00a0 It was nice in its own way though and was relatively pretty, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the Sunday I got up and headed to the craft market at the Arts&#8217; centre that my taxi driver had recommended to me the previous day.\u00a0 It was quite funky with the usual offerings of tarot readings and horrible, knitted woollen hats.\u00a0 There were some other more interesting additions like New Zealand jade and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}