It is extraordinary to survey the damage caused by the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch NZ. So much of the city centre is simply missing.
Many of the city properties are now vacant land, and of those pre-earthquake building that remain, most are boarded up awaiting renovation.
Often the sites are used as car parks, though there are few locals in the ‘city’ as most offices and shops have had to relocate to the suburbs. Only tourists and some builders dot the streets. Some new hotels have been built. The one I am staying in is the tallest building in Christchurch,
two of the others fell down during the earthquake, the site (below) now being vacant as are most of the city blocks.
Those building that remain are mostly boarded up.
Father M 
These pictures remind me of the bomb sites in London when we found buildings flattened on our way to school. We feared the enemy, but here Nature had her way with even the cathedral. So terribly sad for New Zealanders.
I hope you have something to cheer you on your brief holiday. You deserve to be happy.
It certainly looks like a war zone, and the boarded up windows reminded me of the Glomesh bag stint. While I was in hospital, every now and then the images of the destroyed old Cathedral and the new Church/Cathedral came to mind occasionally, the new church looking so bare and not-yet-prayed in quality about it, and the Cathedral which had so many years of spirituality within it. I’m not so sure why that was the image I had, but there you are. I couldn’t see inside the cathedral.
It looked hot there, hopefully not as hot as here today. Good to be home and cool. I hope you are not unhappy.