To keep it 100, Christchurch was an afterthought, mostly thanks to the ticket prices arbitrage. That said, we did have a good time there, and it worked as a good landing for the holiday.
Hotel Give, formerly YMCA (we think) was a very well located place at a reasonable rate. Our little research showed a paucity of such placess in Christchurch.
Our perfectly planned itinerary’s spanner came in the form of Jetstar cancelling its flight from Auckland. This was their last flight for the day, and since we we had to reach Queenstown the same day for a tour, we had to book an Air New Zealand at a price high enough for my kidneys to fear separation. Small consolation – we reached earlier than planned.
And used a bus (instead of the planned Uber) to get to the Rendezvous Heritage Hotel, which practically had its own bus stop. With a Bee card, this did make our life easier.
The serious-looking receptionist didn’t exactly make us feel welcome, but the room made up for it…
New Zealand’s scenic magnificence is legendary and any trip to the left side is risky so long as Trump is around, ergo… We were only the second disaster to hit Auckland in a span of two days. We arrived a day after the cyclone Vaianu. Thankfully, barring the minor inconvenience of small shower spells, we were largely unaffected.
We have aged. We know that because we now choose a Radisson/Accor/Marriott over any cutesy boutiques. Radisson in New Zealand is new. This was Red and we had perks, that helped. We had a decent view of the city, and we could comfortably watch it from that sofa. So, nice enough.
Anna Funder
Stasiland had me hooked on Page 4, when Anna Funder nailed (in the GDR context) my fascination – why I keep reading about (and visiting) Eastern Europe. She calls it horror-romance. “The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.“
After WW 2, when the victorious Allies were divvying up the spoils, Russia began directly controlling the Eastern part of Germany, and in 1949, GDR was established as a satellite state of the USSR. The rhetoric of Communist brotherhood was established, which had liberated East Germans from fascism. The idea was to project GDR as those who were the innocent of Nazism, and that all the Nazis had gone to West Germany! The GDR, in its 40 years of existence tried to create a Socialist German Man, different from Nazi German Man, and from western (Capitalist Imperialist) German Man.
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