Some thoughts

Thought we'd share an assortment of the thoughts that have been floating through our immigrant minds these last couple weeks... bins, guns, and 9/11.

Bins

Christchurch has a great rubbish (garbage) collection system. This may seem like an odd thing to rave about, but wait til you hear. The city provides 3 collection bins - red for rubbish, yellow for recycling, and green for organics. The green bin is collected every week. The yellow and red bins are picked up fortnightly (sidebar - as an American, I thought the word 'fortnightly' went out of style in like 1590, but it turns out it's still widely in use. I guess saying "2 weeks" is uncool.) We can't believe how little rubbish we have now that we separate out recycleables and organics. We probably only fill up one bag every 2 weeks. Incredible!

The city is taking our organics bin and making a giant compost heap. Why isn't every city doing this? This new system just started this year, but Christchurch says it hopes to reduce the amount of domestic rubbish going to landfill by 1/3.

The other great thing about the organics bin is that it got us to start doing our own composting. Since we were already separating out the organics, it made sense to keep them for ourselves and make our own compost. We have our very own stinky heap of black gold in the garden right now.

Guns

A couple days ago I was walking home from work and a police officer was walking in front of me. He had on the full officer attire: hat, vest, boots. But no gun. The police officer had no gun. I asked around, and it turns out the regular beat cops don't carry guns. There is a special armed forces that will be called out if guns are needed. Gareth says it was the same in Britain. This makes sense to me.

I used to see cops with guns in the Starbucks in Phoenix , and I always thought, "Do you really need a gun at your side to order that venti mocha?" Somehow, having guns around - even on a police officer - made me feel less safe. But maybe that's just me.

There was a story in the paper this week about street violence. The gist of the story was that violent crime had become more deadly in recent years because more people were carrying knives. They were comparing fist fights to knife fights. It's strangely comforting to think that if we're attacked by a thug, he's probably not going to have a gun. We can totally run away from a knife.

9/11

Of course, the anniversary of 9/11 happened the week before last. It did not go unnoticed here on the other side of the world. Christchurch has its own sculpture to honor the fallen firefighters. It's made of 3 of the actual burnt girders taken from the World Trade Center wreckage. New York City gave these to Christchurch as a gift so that it could build a memorial.

The American Club (yes, there's an American Club here!) put on a small memorial service that included speeches by the mayor and an American Embassy representative, as well as a dove release. Up in Auckland, firefighters climbed the stairs of a tall building in full gear in honor of the NYC firefighters who climbed to their death.