Children play in piles of silt in the popular seaside spot. People stroll down the street.
But all is as not as happy as it may appear.
Chief Fire Officer John Reed reckons every home has something wrong with it.
Eighty homes have been evacuated.
Fifty of them are uninhabitable, their concrete bases smashed and foundations moved sideways.
Volunteer firefighter Trevor Casey's lounge is now 170mm lower than his kitchen. The quake split his home's concrete base in two, dropping one side of the two-storey house lower than the other.
Not that you can see that from the outside.
The 25 members of the Brooklands Volunteer Fire Brigade have basically been working non-stop since the quake; even the five whose homes are now too dangerous to live in.
At first, they were helping people secure walls and chimneys.
Now, they are helping people clean up and move furniture, and checking people's welfare along the way.
On the waterfront, the Muddy Puddle Restaurant and Bar has been torn asunder and half of it is falling into the lagoon.
You can see the lagoon through a 30cm crack between the restaurant and the car park.
"There is a good chance of it falling in the water.
"That gap started at 6mm just after the quake.
"All the cracks in the building and the car park are getting wider every day," said owner Debbie Riley, whose parents Alistair and Pat Jones, of Oamaru, built the bar 25 years ago.
She and husband Kevin have been staying in the city with friends since the quake.
Their house is uninhabitable.
"I'm homeless and jobless. We pretty much lost everything in a couple of minutes of shaking.
"We haven't got a lot of homes down or anything, but we have actually got a lot of really serious problems," Ms Riley said.
"We've had Bob Parker out here today [during his mayoral tour of fire brigades]. They're getting it now I think."
The biggest issue now was what they should do, she said.
Her main concern was rain, which would get in through the cracks and could wash away the clay base on which the entire structure was built.
"And she's [the building's] already on the move."