we visited just a few weeks ago and had a great time.  i've still got loads of pictures i haven't posted of it, so here are a few.

we went to the cathedral where one of the vicars was dressed as an octopus.  you've got to like that in a religious building

and all the buildings were lovely

it's been interesting to watch the various online visualisations and map mashups over the last week.  a quick google search for christchurch quake map shows you a few.  crowd sourcing and machine mashups are all excellent, but the challenge becomes finding the definitive version.   

This one set the bar for visualising the relentlessness of the aftershocks

the new role for authorities in times of crisis is defining the 'official' twitter hashtags and url for the master crowd source google map.

so to all chums, fellow countrymen/women, collagues, students, visitors and anyone else down in christchurch, we wish you all the best and hope things get back to normal as soon as

here are a couple of my faves:

earth quakes over the last 6 months in new zealand (shown over 1 minute)

visualisation of official and crowd sourced data (click up the top to enable the crowd source data)

and mapquake seems to be the official google maps one