2008-04-26 Day 112

Today was my 112th day in Christchurch. (That's how I know.) Just like the first 111 days, I didn't do anything spectacular. Immigration blood test in the morning, breakfast at home, lunch in the Casino, dinner at home. At least the trip to the Casino was interesting. I spent half an hour watching roulette players win and lose. Mostly lose. It was the $2 table, which means that the cheapest chip costs two bucks. I saw one guy put two chips on the table and win with both of them. He was lucky and he knew it, because right after that he cashed in and went away. But I also saw someone lose a thousand dollars, shrug it off and move on to the $5 table. Fascinating.

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Here's why I looked up how long I've been here for: because today I saw the inside of the Cathedral! I've been walking over Cathedral Square so often now that I became a little bit like a Kiwi when it comes to ignoring the church. It's big enough, but after a while it appears to be cloaked by a SEP-field. Anyway, today I went inside and what can I say... it's a church. Benches, stones, the whole shebang. If I was an expert like my dad, I would have appreciated the Gothic ogives and the colorful windows, but to a noob like me it looks remarkably like the Speyer Cathedral just around the corner in Germany.
One thing is different, though. Apparently Kiwis are quite fond of donating things with their name on it. When you're sitting on a bench in a park, more likely than not it has a tag on it with something like This bench has been donated by Jack, who loved to sit on it with Jill. There's nothing wrong with that, as far as I'm concerned. But in the church, every single wall section is dedicated to and/or donated by a person whose name is written on it. That's where fine by me ends and ridiculous begins. But hey, who am I to judge. After all, I've never donated so much as a nail, and it's better to build a church out of billboards than not to build it at all.
Wait, what am I saying? I'm not even religious!

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This is absolutely random, but when I wrote the text above, I once typed "kitchen" instead of "church". Maybe because the German word for church is "Kirche", which sounds a wee bit like kitchen. It's interesting what kind of mistakes we make, isn't it?