Christchurch - it can bring a tear to your eye, but it just ain't no Gore

It must seem like only yesterday I was ranting on this blog about Shapeshifter and all their goodness. Well it doesn’t stop there. 5 hours driving and a long list of reminders written on the back of my hand of what I should be doing for school is all it takes to make 36 hours away from Dunedin a worthwhile holiday. Shapeshifter were to play with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. This was something not to be missed, although the back of my hand was screaming otherwise. We had about 2 hours to shake off those car-journey legs, find food and actually come to grasps that something we had to prepare for a month ago was finally here. Tickets sold out 2 weeks before, and I was lucky enough to get the 3rd to last one.

One mystery was solved that night – what do all those old ladies that supervise the exams do for the rest of the year? They collect your ticket at the door and separate you from your friends stating that your ticket is for upstairs and theirs are for downstairs, and under no circumstances are you allowed to go join them. But no time to waste. It wasn’t long before I found a group of drunk 1st year engineering students and hippies dancing to their own internal tunes. Looking straight down onto the stage was surreal. It was when the orchestral struck its 1st note, the bows all moving in unison, that I realised I had stopped breathing and tears were rolling down my cheeks. U n b e l i e v a b l e was the only way to describe it. The background video of New Zealand landscapes, from cities, to coastlines, to forest and sky, were tainted by the NHFC course, as all I could think about was "how the hell did there get that movement so smooth?! That's waaay too low for aerial photography!" Yup, school is our everything. The caffine-injected all-nighters to catch up on school which followed this weekend get-away were nothing out of the ordinary. But they were the first ones that I don't regret having to do.