Wow what a weekend this has been! I was on the computer on Friday afternoon when I started seeing all these Twitter & Facebook posts from friends in my hometown of Christchurch saying something about an earthquake in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Thinking it must just be another little one I didn’t get too panicked… but I soon realised that it was actually a pretty big one – 7.4 on the Richter scale – so immediately I tried to ring my parents. No answer… eeeeek! More news reports & pictures started to filter through online & I was glued to the screen for the next couple of hours as first light was starting to break over there. People were out on the street taking photos & uploading them to Twitter & the news sites from home were picking them up to go with their published stories.

An amazingly horrible surreal feeling to be sitting on the other side of the world watching this unfold in my gorgeous hometown just literally minutes after it happened!
So I’m still frantically trying to ring & text my parents & brother to make sure they were ok. Mum and Dad have a pitched glass roof running above their bedroom so my mind was going to all kinds of crazy places. I eventually got a text from my brother to say he was ok but it was a scary time. As he wasn’t with Mum and Dad I still had no idea about them… But then an hour later I finally got a text back from my Mum to say they were ok – shaken but fine. I’ve never felt so relieved in my entire life! They had no power or water & ended up relying on me for the info on what had actually happened. They have self-contained flats under the house which are built right into the hill and pretty much like a bunker so they apparently had been down there since it happened.

In the next few hours I got to actually speak to them & they seemed in good spirits but were eager for any info I had. So that’s when I told them about the destruction in the central city with lots of historic buildings reduced to rubble, flooding in many places as water mains burst… and how the worst of society had come out to take advantage – looters.
A day later and I’m still struggling with how surreal it is to be so far away & going about my normal day when this chaos is going on back home. I even got teary last night looking at the photos of the destruction… it is only bricks & mortar but it’s home you know?

What has been totally amazing is the support from my Twitter & Facebook buddies who have expressed concern & offered cyber *hugs* which has really helped enormously… I love the Internet at times like this! Bonding with fellow Kiwis also over here & feeling lost at being so far away has helped too… hearing their stories & offering them support as I know what they’re going through.

Christchurch is going to take a long time to recover from this… especially as major aftershocks are still happening – over 35 so far – and another big quake is predicted apparently!