For those who are looking at this gallery in the distant future (if there be such people), this will just be another shot in a very erratic and intermittent sequence of photos.

For those who are looking at it when I'm posting it (28 May 2023, some 6 years after it was taken), it is yet another out of sequence gap-filler in my 2017 to 2023 (so far) PESO gallery.

This was a shot from the first day of our week in the South Island of New Zealand in July of 2017. Christchurch, on the east coast of the South Island, was our base of operations for the first few days. We left Sydney early in the morning of Sunday the 23rd on an Emirates A380 and, after a 3 hour flight and 2 timezones, arrived in Christchurch around lunchtime.

In the afternoon we went exploring, and the results of that are in the relevant New Zealand gallery on my site, which I am finally getting around to putting up. Christchurch had been devastated by a major earthquake some 6 years before our visit and many of the scars were still visible. However some places had returned to a sense of normality, including the very funky C1 café which we went to for a late afternoon snack.

This is not the best shot that I took of the café that day, but it is the most comprehensive one. (Also I like the way the girl in the shot was looking straight at me; in every other shot she was in, she was looking down on her phone. However this one showed her busting me in taking a candid, though not of her so much as the café as a whole. I have a distinct ambivalence about the motion blur of the waitress behind her, but unless you stage a shot you can't have everything.)

So let's loop through some of the things that you can see, and some that you can't clearly (but can in my Day 1 gallery for this trip). There's a pinball machine over on the left. There is a horse from a merry go round on the right because... of course there is. There are Japanese anime cartoons on the wall. In front of Miss Busted, the sharp eyed may note an old cast iron style teapot.

You'd have to have impossibly good eyesight to see what's beyond the blonde lady who is standing up, but it's a wall full of Penguin books. What's so special about that? Part of the wall is actually a sliding door to the back of the café. It's just beyond the glass cases with their displays of diecast model cars.

"But wait", I hear you ask, "what are those tubes on the ceiling?"

They're pneumatic tubes, also called air tubes or Lamson tubes, not after the guy who invented them, but from the guy who made them a commercial success in the 1880s. The idea is simple; you have a series of tubes that connect various parts of a building or buildings. These are usually made of aluminium or a substance like PVC. On one end there is a pump which can either pump air into or pull air out of the tube. A container is then placed inside the tube and the pressure differential causes the higher pressure side to push the tube along.

The tubes were useful for transporting relatively small objects around buildings or in some cases even between buildings. For example, in a department store cash registers will accumulate cash over the day (or did before Covid sent cash out of fashion, just like department stores are). The excess cash can be put into a container in a pneumatic tube linked to the store strongroom, and sent straight there. This lowers the chance of robbery. Some hospitals used them to transport pathology samples or medicines; I believe that some still do. The US Library of Congress used them to receive requests from readers and send documents back to them. They were also installed in Australia's old Parliament House, and thus made their way into the new one... though by the time it was opened in 1988 "new" technology like faxes {chortle} and computers with e-mail made them redundant.

And this building? It was once the Christchurch Telegraph and Post Office, before those services started to die out, so the presence of Lamson tubes is not unexpected either. Pneumatic tubes were introduced by the US Postal service to move mail in Philadelphia in 1893. By 1915 you could find about 90km of the things under the streets of Boston, Brooklyn, New York, Chicago and St. Louis as well.

Here, the deliveries are much shorter range. Specifically you place your order, go and sit at your table and... whoosh! An insulated container with your order in it arrives via the magic of air compression.

It's a delightfully funky place and the food isn't bad either. If you find yourself in Christchurch some day, I suggest adding it to your To Do list.