Ōtautahi / Christchurch Daily Photo

This morning I went along to the re-opening of the Palms shopping centre in Shirley. It was great to see it open again and full of people. A teenage boy sang Pokarekare Ana and I was surprised that it brought a tear to my eye. It’s not just a shopping mall you see, it’s a very huge symbol of getting back to a way of life that has been gone for so long. I have many fond memories of meeting friends for coffee and movies at that mall or just shopping for stuff for the house with my partner. There were many wet and cold Saturday afternoons where we’d go to the Palms and have a coffee and sit and watch the shoppers go by. We’d wonder what was in their bags… and why was it that there seemed to be a much higher occurrence of couple hand-holding at the Palms than any of the other malls?

Now I have to talk about the cake! Not only did they have a very happy clown, but there was a giant cake (you can see part of it by the ribbon cutting). The cake was made by Just Desserts and it took more than 200 hours to create it. It’s chocolate cake (60 kilos of chocolate in fact) and they used 20 dozen eggs. They needed a crane to transport the cake to the mall! I looked but I didn’t see any knives for cutting the cake, and the security card was getting kind of nervous about the bunch of woman leaning over to get a closer look…

They used 80 kilos of fondant icing! It’s quite a feat.

So congratulations to the Palms on your big re-opening, well done on everyone who worked so hard to get it back up and running, and I for one am looking forward to many more coffees and people watching and of course some shopping!