<William> We've finally arrived at the end of our long journey in Christchurch.

We spent a really excellent couple of days in Wellington enjoying the culture (mostly the bars!) and sunshine. It's a really nice city - more compact than other NZ cities and so has a much more lively feel. It has the best nightlife we've found in NZ too, lots of cool bars conveniently located within a few metres of each other so you can go on a pub crawl! There's also the national museum where we spent about 3 hours in the Lord of the Rings exhibition which has the details of how all the films were made along with some of the props from the film. As we're fands of the movies the exhibition was really great detail and made us want to go back and watch them again to see if we can tell which people on film were digital dreations and which ones were real!

After a couple of nights camping in Wellington (in the back garden of a central city hostel!) & the ferry crossing we went full speed down the coast to Christchurch. First impressions are that it's a very pretty town and has a very british feel to it with the many stone buildings & bridges and weeping willows by the river but it's definitely a bit lacking in night life, or indeed any kind of life because there's doesn't seem to be much of it during the day either!

I've started my cookery course now and I'm pretty engrossed in it already. It's quite overwhelming how much there is to learn and how relatively little time I have to learn it, given that most chefs take at least 3 years training! I now have all my equipment - most importantly of all a really big, heavy and razor sharf knife! Already taken a couple of little chunks out of my fingers but haven't drawn blood yet! I've spent most of today chopping vegtables into precise sizes and making a massive vat of vegtable soup with the results! Never appreciated how cutting everything into same-sized pieces (so they cook at the same rate) really makes a difference to the flavour of the dish.

We're still staying in a hostel at the moment which is convenient for walking to college but inconvenient in every other way - no parking, sharing a dorm, lots of noise and no control over what's on tele! We've been looking for accomodation but nothing has really grabbed us just yet so we're holding out for something that will be fun as well as being a place to stay. </William> <!--2:05 AM-->