For Christmas, my friend Mike Boyle took me ice skating in the Rocky Mountains 🙂 The weather was great, well as great as minus 20 degrees can be, and there was HEAPS of ice. Unfortunately there was a tad too much snow to make skating viable.
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I went skiing at the Sunshine ski field in the Rocky Mountains twice while living in Calgary. It turns out I’m not very good at skiing 😛
A beautiful skating pond near my home in Calgary.
Well what do you do when you’re stuck in a strange foreign land on Christmas day? You have a Christmas orphans dinner that’s what! Gregor and I bought a turkey, got a bunch of other foreigners (Gregor’s from Oz) and then we deep fried the little bugger – the turkey, not the foreigners!
The locals seemed to think it was some sort of weird Aussie/Kiwi tradition to deep fry a turkey, but of course it’s not. It was just a crazy idea of Gregor’s which turned out to be lots of fun. We also deep fried brocoli, carrots, cauliflower, Moro bars and other assorted goodies 🙂
The photo below is of me standing on our rink with my Possum Bourne beanie and Speights T-shirt that my mum sent me. Of course the deep fryer was right in front of me so I couldn’t play hockey that day, but it made for a nice photo 🙂
My roommate (flatmate in Kiwi speak) and I went tobogganing. Of course those crazy Canadian kids decided it would be a good idea to build a nice ramp exactly where the natural flow of the hill goes so you end up going backwards at full speed over a ridiculously steep jump! We had a scary fast purple flying saucer style sled and a suicidal magic carpet to risk our lives and limbs on. We had lots of fun though, albeit we were the oldest kids on the hill 😛
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Ice skating at the Olympic Plaza in Calgary, Canada.
Well what else do you do when it’s -15 degrees outside and you have an itch to play hockey? The idea of the rink came about one day when my roommate (flatmate) Gregor and I were sitting round talking about how his old roommate had built a rink in their backyard. So I was like “dammit, I’m buildin’ us a rink today!”, so I googled as many things as I could on rink building to figure out the best plan of attack. You can build them by building a snow wall and spraying water directly on to the ground, but this apparently messes up the lawn and takes longer to freeze, so I headed to Walmart and picked up a rink liner for $10 (big sheet of plastic) and filled it up with water. A day and a bit later and we had a fully functioning ice rink in our front yard 🙂
Getting the ice surface smooth is no easy task. I tried leaving hose on it for a while, but it just created a nice big lump on one side of the rink 🙁 Buckets of hot water did the trick, but it took quite a few to cover it.
Anna Williams came to visit me in Calgary 🙂 Unfortunately she wont let me put any photos of her online 🙁 But here’s a photo of the beautiful sunset we experienced while walking back from the Calgary zoo.
Halloween party with chemists in Calgary.
Mike Boyle took me to see a Western Hockey League (WHL) game featuring the Calgary Hitmen at the Saddledome in Calgary. The game was very exciting, lots of big hits, lots of skill and a WAY higher level of hockey than I’d seen before. Unfortunately the NHL lockout was on at the time so I couldn’t see any NHL games so this was the next best thing.
