ChCh Cha

Christchurch is growing on me.
It's about time, given that I've been here now for longer than any of the other cities I have visited so far. I haven't really said a great deal about the place so far: looking back, I notice that I mentioned that it's touristy, it's sort of English in appearence, that there's a river, that sort of thing. First impressions, like a parroted paragraph from a guide book.
Staying here longer, as is no doubt the case with any other city, has a curious effect. It first breaks down those initial impressions and then, eventually, rebuilds them in a slightly different way.
Thus, my first impressions (pretty, clean, touristy) gave way to something less favourable, and more recently these secondary impressions have in turn been replaced with something more realistic.
The second impressions - the "What am I doing here" impressions - stemmed, I think, from the fact that I had seen other, more scenic places in the interim: Abel Tasman, Fiordland, the west coast and Queenstown. Eye-bleedingly beautiful places where buildings and streets - should they exist - do so at the mercy of the landscape's texture and contours.
Queenstown itself is easy to fall in love with. It's small, managable, and surrounded on all sides by the sort of scenery which makes you want to put down roots right there and then - a lot of people have, you can tell by the pot-pori of accents in the local supermarket. Everyone's local, everyone's not.
Christchurch, by comparison, is flat and really rather dull - no surprise there as it was built as a presbityrian paradise, there's little in the way of quick-fix appeal. Outside the pretty, central part of the town: the flag-stone paved strip linking the bustling cathedral square with the arts centre, the extensive parks and gardens - the city gives way disapointingly quickly to bland comercial and industrial zones, or anonymous suburbs built along the straight, flat, long streets. And these areas spread for miles - so far that the city feels like a vast grey spawlling puddle with only a glimmer of beauty and intrest at its heart.
So as I waved Tamsin off at the airport, I retreated back to the hostel and wondered what on earth I was doing in Christchurch. Gary and Julia had just moved to Queenstown of course, and I was on my own again. There was logic to my decision - I needed money for my plane ticket home if nothing else, and it would be much easier to save in Christchurch than Queenstown - with less crazy temptations to spend money around every corner, (being flat, there are remarkably few things to jump off). And yet, wandering the streets alone - those long, straight, grey streets - I felt as though I had come to the wrong decision entirely.
But I stayed, and finally the place is growing on me - although this is a relatively new development. First I had to find somewhere to stay and if my trials at finding accomodation in Auckland are anything to go by, I seem doomed to make a pigs ear of this no matter where I am.
In Auckland - and Melbourne and Sydney earlier still - I found myself moving from hostel to hostel trying to find a bed in a dorm with the bare minimum of noise, sex, violence or people who spend the small hours of the morning aranging crystals of power on their beside table. In Christchurch I moved from shared house to shared house with similar disatisfaction.
First though, I had a week on a floor.

Gary and I met Jenaya on the tour bus in South America, and she has been living in Christchurch now for almost a year, managing a restaurant in the Northern suburbs. Dropping in to say hello shortly after I first arrive in town, she offered me both a job and floorspace, the job is still going strong - two evenings a week at the kitchen sink at her restaurant - but I was reluctant to outstay my welcome on the floor, given that after only a few days, I got the impression that her flatmates wanted their lounge back.
It's a strange thing, really. No matter how nice people are when it comes to spreading out a sleeping bag on their lounge floor, it's hard to feel genuinely comfortable there - and not in the sense that the floor is uncomfortable, more the sort of 'oh for heaven's sake' expressions you get in the morning as you are stepped over by someone making their way to the kitchen to find their breakfast.
So I started looking for new accomodation pretty sharpish. Grabbing the papers on wednesday and saturdays and rationing my remaining dollars to fund infrequent jaunts to internet cafes to inspect the rooms-vacant websites.
My experience in Aukland - that 'see a great house, move in' situation, sadly proved to be a one off. Cue a string of rooms for rent - some grotty, some even worse, a few even worse still.
Then I found City Rooms. An unusual company which occupies the grey area somewhere between the backpacker hostel and the shared house. They offer single rooms in a handful of houses all located in the inner suburbs and when I called them, they had a room free immediately and I was invited to view it.
The house certainly looked impressive from the outside. A large, squat, cluster of blue slatted walls and red pitched roofs presiding over a neat front garden. A wicker chair sat invitingly in the porch, and a hand painted sign reading ‘City Sanctuary’ hung above the door.
Inside, the front room was also appealing: dark wood panelling lining the walls and a staircase coiled up the walls to the upper floor. I was led to the room: a sizable double with a squishy bed and an oddball collection of salvaged furniture which would have made Lovejoy run away screaming. The carpet was a crowded mass of conflicting colours and shapes and taking up most of one wall was a huge slate fireplace, topped with a wooden mantelpiece which wrapped around the broad chimney breast. The doors and windows stood wide open and the place – while eccentric – seemed fine, if a little gloomy.
I said yes. I signed the contract, and I was quite pleased with myself until I closed the windows and door and noticed the smell.
It was one of those smells you get in stuffy rooms full of old furniture and furnishings: cloyingly sweet, rich and thick. The sort of smell you might expect as a penance should you take it upon yourself to bury someone under the floorboards. So it was then that the alarm bells starting ringing, and when I saw the kitchen, they became deafening.

Now, I should point out here that I do actually think that City Rooms is an excellent idea and most of their other properties which I have noticed since (each with the distinctive hand-painted signs, most with additional wooden butterflies bolted to the walls), have appeared to be very attractive places. Also the price is not prohibitive, costing exactly the same as a week in a large dormitory in the cheapest hostel in town, only with an City Room, you get a furnished double room to yourself, with free internet access and various other trimmings. The owners are fantastically friendly too and the whole thing would be an absolute winner if you end up in one of the nice rooms, with nice people. But there’s an element of the lottery involved and for the most part, the company itself has no control over this – some rooms and houses are better than others thanks to the people who stay in them - and on this occasion, the jackpot was out of my reach.
When I had first called, there was only one room available and the facilities here left much to be desired - largely because the others in the house seemed, presumably, reluctant to either socialise or clean up after themselves. The kitchen upstairs which I had seen, was very nice indeed. The one downstairs was a hole. Literally, it occupied the cramped space between the bathroom and the laundry room and contained two tall fridges whose doors would not close; a cluster of assorted cabinets; an oven which looked as though it was being used for a chemistry experiment and a stack of pans with their bottoms burnt out.
On top of all of all this, I seemed to be the only one who lived there. The other rooms were all full I had been told, but the doors remained closed and the living area empty. Someone must have been there – who else added to the stack of dirty dishes in the kitchen and left mats of pubic hair in the shower? (Not I, a sense of self-righteous disgust at the state of the place bred a certain vigilance on my part: it wasn’t going to be my fault the place was a pit, dammit.)
Miserable and fatalistic, I resigned myself to spending Christmas there.

The following day, I had a phone call from one of the rooms I had seen the previous week. It had been one of the nicer places I had visited out of a bad bunch. A clean, modern room in an otherwise bland little townhouse close to the park. I had turned it down because the cost had been beyond my means, so I was surprised when a woman named Louise called me about it.
“So you’re sure you’re not interested?” She asked.
I admitted that I’d already signed a contract for a place and reiterated that the rent was too much for me.
Louise said nothing for a moment, then said:
“What about if we reduced the rent?”
I flustered verbally for a bit, as I tend to do when people are unexpectedly nice to me over the telephone.
“Really?” I said, trying to repress the English Hugh Grant gene, “Um. Sure.”
I added that I would have to stay here for the minimum of seven days, but after that…
“Right.” Louise cut me off, “Why don’t you call my mum?”
“Sorry?”
“She owns the house.”
“Oh, I see.”
I took down the number of Louise Senior and called her to arrange a meeting. By two o’clock I was trekking across the park, back to the house a slight spring in my step for every pace which I put between myself and the City Sanctuary.

I had been expecting just another straight-forward chat in which I would promise to move in, pay the rent, and act like the good tenant – the usual sort of thing. When I reached the house, a pick-up truck was parked outside and a tall man in overalls opened the door accompanied by a plump Staffordshire Terrier.
This man was Bart. The dog was Tyson.
“I’m a mechanic.” Said Bart unprompted and rather unnecessarily.
Tyson didn’t say anything, being a dog.
They lead me upstairs to where Louise and her mother were waiting in the lounge.
Unsettlingly, they weren’t alone. Also there was Louise’s dad and her uncle sat around the lounge sat back with their boots off. What followed was half discussion about my prospective rent, and half what seemed like intervention. It was only the thought of spending Christmas in the grotty little room I had ended up in that kept me from bolting completely.
The situation was as follows:
The family were planning on selling the house early the following year and were looking for a tenant to pay rent for the room during the Christmas period. Given that they were having difficulty finding anyone willing to take on such a short lease, they were happy to make a compromise when it came to the rent.
In turn, I just wanted to move somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t where I already was, so it struck me that we could help each other.
Louise’s father sat back in his chair and passed a beer to his brother. Louise’s mother sat back and scratched Tyson’s ears. Louise made Bart a cup of tea. There was an awkward pause, which I eventually filled by thanking them profusely.
“I suppose you can move in when your current lease is up.” Said Louise Senior.
The favour, clearly, was a one-way thing after all.

Perhaps predictably, living in the house proved every bit as uncomfortable as the meeting.
Aesthetically, it was clean, bland and largely pristine. Outside, the front door was flanked by two ugly garages and topped with a rather pointless balcony which overlooked the car park rather than the city park. Inside, white doors led off white corridors, with nothing to personalise the space in evidence anywhere. Aside from Louise and Brad, I found myself living with Louise’s sister whose name was Susan and an English guy called Peter.
None of them seemed to be very sociable, let alone friendly. Susan spoke to me precisely once during my stay and that was because when I first met her, I introduced myself. She seemed a little startled: not because there was a stranger now living in the room next door, but because the stranger seemed willing to talk to her. Thereafter she pointedly ignored me, no matter what I said.
Peter seemed to spend all of his time watching American Football and Baseball on the television. He was friendlier, although he too always seemed a little surprised when I would greet him: looking up guiltily from the television to reply, then slinking back down slowly, until he wouldn’t have to talk anymore.
Louise and Brad spoke largely only to each other. I was greeted when a bill was due, but other than that, they had more time for the dog.
The dog, I liked. So that was something.

And though all of this, Christchurch just lurked somewhere in the background and seemed to absorb most of the blame.
I didn’t really know anyone else. I only saw Jenaya at work: so busy juggling the many demands of the restaurant there was no time to drag her out for a beer. Meanwhile, the employment agency sent me to warehouses and factories and industrial plants – jobs so transitory that you only see people rather than meet them, and then every evening, I trudged back to the house, fully expecting to do little more than slump in my bedroom with a paperback and wait for the night to come and go.
Christ, I thought, what the hell am I doing here?

For Christmas and the New Year, I headed down to Queenstown to catch up with Gary and Julia. They lived in a funky little place with barbeques and house parties. I was sort of jealous, but inspired enough that when I slinked back to Christchurch and started looking for somewhere new.
It took longer than I was expecting, but with two weeks worth of rent already paid at my current address, I at least had the luxury of being picky.
I scoured the papers and the websites when I had the chance, scrawling down phone numbers in my diary and calling them from the house phone when I got home. I saw a tiny flat shared by a couple and a cat, I saw a bizarre place near the beach owned by a woman named Briar Rose and I saw a nice little house by the river which wasn’t actually available for another month.
The final phone call was in the evening once I was back from work.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m calling about the ad for the room.”
“Really?” said the woman at the other end of the line, “I haven’t put the ad in the paper yet.”
“I saw it on the Trade Me website?”
“Oh. Hang on.”
I hung.
“Oh yes.” She said. “I only put it up half an hour ago. Golly, you're fast.”
The house was at the end of St. Asaph Street, which was only down the road from where I was, so I offered to run down and see it immediately.
“I’ll let them know you’re coming.” She said and hung up.
Typically of course, the end of St. Asaph Street which was only a ten minute walk from Hagley Park was the wrong end of the street – and being one of Christchurch’s long, straight roads, it took me a further half an hour to reach the house itself: A small, neat red-roofed cottage located in the middle of what looked like an industrial estate.
So the location was rubbish. But the house at least was lovely.

There was character here for a start, and while the pictures on the wall weren’t exactly the pictures I would have chosen myself, at least they were pictures. The lounge was large and populated with three assorted sofas clustered around a bulky looking coffee table. The bedroom was huge, the kitchen large and well stocked.
There were five other residents: two Slovakians, one Korean, one German and an American. We talked in the kitchen and it was friendly and relaxed – a thousand miles from the interrogation at Hagley Park. I moved in the following week – and the day I arrived, I was greeted with a glass of wine and everyone gathered for a house meal.
This was more like it, I thought.

Since then, Christchurch has grown on me, like I said.
I’ve been to several of the town’s beaches, I’ve been to an odd little street party in the gorgeous port village of Lyttleton on the other side of the hills (proving that not all of Christchurch is so boringly flat). In town, I discovered the wonders of High Street - one of the few streets in the city centre which cuts in a rakish, defiant diagonal across the otherwise regimented square grid, and is thus the street crowded with all the interesting, slightly non-conformist shops and cafes.
But I think the main reason that I quite like the town now is less to do with the town itself, and more down to the fact that I now have somewhere I can go to escape it if I want to.
It’s a fortune-cookie sentiment to be sure, but it’s the people who make the place: I’m not stuck in Christchurch anymore. I can leave any time I want to.