Another reunion! We met Craig...Mel...and Paolo at Midnight Espresso, which the family have been talking about the whole way around South Island. We're all back together again for a day. We keep saying by to each other, then meet up a few days later.

The weather was miserable today, the same as when we came to Wellington about 4 weeks ago! So me and Therese decided to go the free museum called Te Papa. The rest of the family have already been when they were here last. It's a decent museum and they have some good exhibits like how New Zealand was formed and a lot of history into the migrations here. There's also a good photo exhibit by a famous Kiwi photographer, whose name I can't remember.

We met Paolo and Mel in the museum cafe where they were using the free WiFi. And that's where we went on Facebook and found out about the Christchurch earthquake, then read on the news that it was pretty big and that part of the cathedral had collapsed which we'd only seen 2 days ago! We got out in time, that's for sure. We set our Facebook statuses and sent a couple of messages just to let people know we're fine anyway.

Me and Therese made chilli tonight for us and the rest of the family. We met round at our place, YHA, then went to the cinema to see The Fighter. That's a brilliant film with a fantastic performance from Christian Bale.

When we came out of the cinema, Therese had a missed call from her sister. That's when we realised that people are probably seeing the news this morning and panicking. So, we decided to go Skype home, and on the way a bar had the news channel on. And that's when we realised how bad the earthquake was. We're so lucky to have left Christchurch when we did. Especially considering that 6 bodies had been pulled out of the YHA hostel we were staying at! It's absolutely awful what's happened, and the city was already a state in some areas from the last earthquake.

We met back at Midnight Espresso as it was only about 9pm, and grabbed a coffee, then met Craig in the bar next door because he wanted a pint. Only turned out to be a gay bar. Craig had gone in earlier on his own to get his pint in, and was asked by a group of guys to join them... Then a few Shirley Bassey songs came on, so we were sure then.

We went back to Nomads for a short while, where the rest of the family is staying, then said our final farewell to Paolo and Craig. They set off back to Auckland tomorrow and then go on another short tour further north, which is what we did at the start of NZ.

We still weren't tired, so watched Sin City in the cinema room at YHA Hostel. That's a decent room with a big projector and nice big comfy sofas.