Oakden here.

Well, today was another wait-around day. We were called very early in the morning and were told we had yet another 24-hour delay. After a leisurely morning, some of us headed over to the Christchurch museum. The museum has excellent sections on the Maoris and early colonial period. There were some nice exhibits on moas, the flightless birds (some over 10' tall) that were hunted to extinction by the early Maoris (whose culture was called the "Moa Hunters").

The museum also had some great displays on Antarctic history, exploration, and natural history. Its hard to remember sometimes that the continent wasn't even discovered until the early 1800s, and that it wasn't actually crossed on the ground until 1955. The museum had many artifacts and accounts of the early explorers. There are a number of huts set up on the ice associated with different explorers, some of which were used by multiple explorers on different expeditions, and it all gets a bit confusing. It seems that some of the equipment we're still using could be considered "historical", and that we're still making history to some degree (although in a very minor way).

After the museum, we had a wonderful walk in the arboretum (its spring here!), then most of us worked for awhile (for me, it was flogging the web page). That night I headed off to an Irish session at a local pub to play some tunes. I met a significant number of the local Irish musicians, got the scoop on the music and dance scenes on both islands, and made some friends for the next time I come through town. Everyone else went to see "City of Gods", an intense movie about child gangs in Brazil. We went to bed REALLY hoping we'd fly out in the morning.