Christmastime

Being away from home at the holidays was something that I had always assumed would be strange. I was in Toronto for Christmas last year, but my family was with me there too so it still felt fairly normal. This year, however, was vastly different.

Despite the obvious weather difference, Christmas over here just isn't quite the same. Back in New Zealand it's almost as though the whole country comes to a stand still while we celebrate Christmas and New Years, not here though. I don't really know how to explain it properly, but even though its a winter wonderland over here, it doesn't really feel like Christmas.

So, sure, I was missing home to the extreme, but we still managed to have a good time. As Christmas Eve here was Christmas Day at home, we celebrated that night with a big dinner. Courtney and Dean did pretty much all the cooking and organising for the night, and they did a great job.  There was way too much food, standard for Christmas, although it didn't last that long during the next few days as the boys eat like its going out of style. We had heaps of fun, followed up by an "ugly sweater party" up at the bar. Some of us didn't have sweaters though so we just wore tinsel and Santa hats, but it was pretty much the same.

I had to work on Christmas Eve and Day, so Boxing Day was a full day of snowboarding.  We progressed up from the beginners hill, to the T Bar,  finishing up on Mile 1 (a real life chair lift run!!) before our afternoon break. That evening we hit the slopes again for a touch of night boarding. It was a little scary at first, but the mountain was really well lit so we just went for it. It was going really well, at first, but on my second run down I took a turn to strongly which caused me to fly backwards and smash my head onto the snow. It was a little awful. Everyone stopped to make sure I was ok, which was nice, but, as I had to lie still to make sure I hadn't broken anything, they thought I was knocked out. Oops. All I can say, is that I am so thankful that I was wearing a helmet. That snow is solid.

Well, Christmas is over, a snowboard has been purchased, and we are now prepping for the madness that will occur on New Year's Eve. Should be fun. The resort is going to be so packed that none of the staff are allowed in the bars. Not to worry though, a party is being thrown for us in the staff accommodation down the mountain. Although, most of us have to work. Ugh.

Happy holidays!

Thanks for reading!

All Work, Little Play.

Holy moly! I feel as though I have been working non stop this past week. I can't even comprehend that I've been in Canada for only 3 weeks, it's madness. My job is really great, but it's making my time here fly by and has resulted in me having very little time to snowboard.

I've had one lesson so far, with my flatmate Caitlin. We are both as terrible as each other so it was a very useful lesson. Although, Caitlin did fall a little bit in love with our instructor so it may not have been as beneficial for her. 

When we first started out it felt like the weirdest thing ever, we could barely even stand up with our boards strapped to one foot, let alone both feet. But by the end of it we were absolute pros. To an extent. We could go down the hill with minimal difficulty, and that was enough for us. The next day was a touch rough on the body though. Since then I haven't had much of an opportunity to go again - I was made to work on my day off - so I'm slightly worried that I will have forgotten everything and just fall on my face a million times. Ah well.

In other news, we went to an ice hockey game the other night! It was just a low league game at the local rink in Invermere, but it was super fun. 20 bucks got us a bus ride, ticket and drink, and it was totally worth it. There about five fights, a few falls, and countless wall smashes. Even one of the refs, who was not young, got rammed into the wall. He recovered fairly well though, later doing a pretty sweet jump. A couple of the guys who came with us added to the entertainment but doing some pretty spectacular heckling during the game, it was mainly towards the players with four letter names they could actually pronounce, but it was still pretty hilarious.

Other than that, I'm basically just having a great time hanging out with my flatmates (even the Aussie ones) and the other cool kids around the resort.

Ok. Cool.

Thanks for reading!

First Week Down

So. It's been a week since we arrived here in Panorama, and it's going great so far. The resort is beautiful, I've never seen so much snow in my life, and the people here are fantastic! Almost all the staff are travellers so they're all super friendly which makes for a really good time.

During our first weekend here the resort threw us a "Disorientation Party" as a welcome for all the staff. The party was massive, taking up the T-Bar and the Wildfire restaurant next door. After some pre-party times at our place, we arrived at the T-Bar a little too late to get in where the band was playing so we moved next door to where the DJ was. The whole night was really great, when the restaurant had its last call we moved to the bar and danced to this great band called Shred Kelly. They sort of reminded me of Mumford and Sons, only a touch more upbeat, I would definitely recommend them.

For a little while everyone sort of ran out of things to do around here, and that, combined with it constantly snowing, kept us all inside for about two days straight. A little sad, I know. But our apartment is just so warm! You try leaving it for an extended period of time and see how it feels!
But then Tuesday rolled around, so Courtney and I started our first day of work. I was a little bit, completely, terrified to be starting the job - convinced I was going to screw everything up. But it wasn't actually that bad. We started at 7:30am, which was a little bit awful, but the girl who was training us (Sif, she is from Denmark) is really nice and the store was actually pretty quiet so we had a lot of time to get used to using the computer system. Thankfully all the customers were extremely understanding and lovely when we were a touch slow.
That night our boss (Jacob, also from Denmark) had all the staff (there are five of us) around for dinner at his place here in the village. There are some wines at the store he wants us to promote to customers so we had a bit of a wine tasting at the same time. Jacob and his girlfriend cooked a delicious roast for us, and it was probably the best meal we have had since we got here. Plus, it was free, so that's always great too.

Yesterday was the big Christmas party (themed 'wild west' for some reason) in the Great Hall. Turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie - it was fantastic. There was a raffle, not that we came close to winning anything, and some pretty cool costumes. Two guys came dressed as cacti and one girl came as a bale of hay. While the rest of us tried to fit in by wearing checked shirts, I found mine at the thrift store for $2. Bargain.
After the dinner, we all moved to the bar again. The DJ this time, however, was not quite as good. As one of the boys pointed out, he was just a guy with a Mac. But we still had a good time all the same.

Anyway, as you can see, not a lot of exciting stuff has been happening. But my sister sent me a fairly intense message asking for an update so I thought I better.
The resort officially opens tomorrow though, so hopefully I'll have something more interesting to say next time.

Thanks for reading!

Kelowna to Panorama and more

We have arrived!

Our night of ten pin bowling in Kelowna turned out to actually be FIVE pin bowling. Quite a different experience indeed. The concept is much the same, however, the bowling balls are about the size of softballs which you basically just throw down the lane. It was a lot more difficult than expected, although we got the hang of it eventfully (but I still came last in my team...ah well).
Next morning we were up at the crack of dawn, well it felt like that since the sun doesn't get up properly until about 9am, to start the final leg of our bus tour. It was a good day, our first stop was a look out point over Coldstream Valley - very beautiful - later we played with some calves (although I don't really know why we stopped there...) and visited the end point of Canada's first ocean to ocean train track. The rest of our bus ride was fairly uneventful, mainly spent on the bus watching movies and taking advantage of the free wifi. However, we did drive through the Rockies and have a picnic in the snow which was fairly interesting.

We arrived at Panorama in the dark, but very excited. Courtney, Dean and myself all live together in the lower village in a place called Horsetheif, so we were given a lift up to our "condominium" by one of the resort staff. Two of our flatmates were already settled in, two boys from Sydney - Madison and Jacob - so we had a little time hanging out with them before heading to bed. Unfortunately our bedding was not supplied for us, so we got to spend the night sleeping on a bare mattress, using couch cushions as pillows and jackets as blankets. Luckily, Canada is big on central heating so we were still fairly warm. The best thing, though, was being able to unpack! Finally!! I've never been so happy to unpack, living out of a bag is definitely not something I am good at.
Waking up to a silent, snow covered village was magical. But extremely disorientating. Thankfully, one of the staff was kind enough to give us a ride up to the staff shuttle when we desperately asked for directions. The shuttle took us down into the town, Invermere, where we spent several hours buying everything we needed. Carrying about ten plastic bags of bedding and food turned out to be much more difficult than we initially thought. Two of my bags had the audacity to break as we were struggling down the hill upon returning to the resort. Even with the help of a couple of friends I still managed to lose feeling in most of my fingers, and the tip of one of then is still tingling (but no frostbite to speak of!).
That night, after a well deserved rest, we checked out the resort nightlife. As the pub situated under our building is not yet open, we headed off to the T Bar in the upper village to see what the situation was. The bar is fantastic. The staff are lovely, checking on you every 10 minutes or so and just being generally great. A lot of the other staff were in the bar so it was nice and rowdy, especially when what seemed like half of Melbourne turned up and started playing pool. The great thing about a place like this though, is that almost everyone is a traveller so they are all keen to meet new people and have a good time together. So, a good night was had by all.

Nothing of great note happened today, so I won't bother boring you with that. But tomorrow is the big staff "Disorientation Party" up at the T Bar with a live band, so good things are still to come for us.

Right. I'll just leave you with that.

Thanks for reading!

Vancouver to Kelowna

Our second day in Vancouver did not amount to much unfortunately. Our swap orientation was at 11am, basically an hour of applying for social security numbers and getting information on banks and cellphones.
After our orientation we split off into little groups and went to open bank accounts and set up our phones. The bank was, mercifully, quick and painless - our cellphone set up, not so much. I was in a group of five, trying to all set up our phones with one cellphone man (thankfully he was joined by another man after a while), which resulted in us spending about 2-3 hours in an underground mall. By the time we made it back upstairs we had lost all daylight (even though it was only 4:30pm) which basically left us with the only option of heading back to the hostel and biding our time until dinner.
Our dinner was hosted by the Moose Travel bus driver, he shouted us to three free drinks and a rather large amount of food (although the main meal was a sufficiently sub par version of beef stroganoff) and went around each table to meet everyone and give us the information we needed for the following day. The evening was good, it gave us an opportunity to meet some of the Australians who would be joining us at Panorama and to get a free meal. Who doesn't like free food, really?
That nights sleep was pretty rough. Despite going to bed early in preparation for our long day, sleep was intermittent and broken completely when two girls were added to our room at 2am. We were far from impressed. And yet we soldiered on. Up at 7am, all packed and ready to go by 8:15.
The Moose tour took us out of Vancouver to this beautiful park which is home to the "Bridal Falls", a quick walk up some very slippery slopes brought us right up next to the waterfall which left us sufficiently soaked. Despite the wet, we were all able to take some great photos of the falls and surrounding nature.
From the falls we were taken to a town called Hope which has the Othello (silent 't') Tunnels. The tunnels were kind of cool, but the best part was the big river right next to them - so we spent most of the time taking shots of that instead.
An hour later we were in the snow. Freddy (the bus driver) took us to a rest stop for five minutes so we could use the "washroom", however it turned into about fifteen minutes of us taking photos while trying to not be hit by flying snow balls. After a couple more hours of driving we ended up in the clouds, 6000ft above Vancouver. Dense fog and snow surrounded us. It was rather beautiful.
So now we are here. In Kelowna. Tonight's agenda is a salmon BBQ and bowling. Should be interesting.
Thanks for reading!

The Other Side

We are finally here!

After what felt like the longest flight in the world (2 hours sleep out of 13), a painful 1 hour wait to get through customs and immigration and a slow train ride (I was forced to sit next to the most annoying girl ever - despite the fact that she was only there for one stop), we are officially in downtown Vancouver!
This city is just fantastic. I keep comparing it to Toronto, which may not be entirely fair, and it is just so different. For one thing, it doesn't have any scary religious people yelling at you on the street, which is always a bonus. The streets are surprisingly clean and they don't have the suspicious toilet smells of Toronto, one of the first things I noticed.
I am officially staying in my first backpackers (while not on a school trip) and it is interesting. I was initially rooming with three random girls, but thankfully one of my friends on the trip had a room all to herself so I was able to switch. I feel more comfortable in a room with someone I know, and we have much more room with just the two of us in here. The backpackers is called Samesun and seems to be fairly popular, but that may be due to the cool bar downstairs.
Once we were all settled into the room and had had a much needed shower, we were ready to hit the streets. I wandered down the Main Street we were on with Courtney (my roommate) and our friend Katie. We explored a few shops (found some AMAZING Christmas jumpers) and eventually stumbled upon a Tim Hortons. You haven't officially visited Canada if you haven't been to Tim's, so really we had know choice but to make a pit stop. And it was immensely worth it. The hot chocolate and the food was just as great as I had remembered it, and it was just what we needed after only having eaten plane food for our past two meals.
So now, after having made myself stay up to a reasonable time, I am able to finally have my much needed sleep.

Thanks for reading!

Okthanksseeyabye

Holy moly. December 2nd is finally here. In about 10 hours time I'll be settling into what will be my "bed" for 13 hours.
I've been trying to find the best way to describe how I've been feeling of late, however I am doubtful that any words quite match it. Don't get me wrong, I am of course immensely excited to be starting my new adventure with a great group of like-minded Kiwi travellers...but the extremely brief time I have been able to spend with my friends this summer almost gives me feelings of trepidation about leaving so soon. And yet, all great adventures must start with a few nerves, so onward it is!

The thing that seems to be worrying me the most about this trip is the drastic weather change I am headed for. To leave behind the deliciously warm Bay of Plenty and arrive in the chilly, if not freezing, British Columbia, is something I am unsure my body will handle well. The expected weather in Vancouver should be alright, temperatures like those are to be expected in a NZ winter (in the north island at least), I just hope I have enough thermals to survive the drastically low temperatures in Panorama.

 Anyway, despite the weather and the friends I'll be leaving behind, this trip to Canada is something I have been looking forward to for the last six months. I know I'm going to have a fantastic time and meet some amazing people, just like last time, and I'll hopefully become a half decent skier or snowboarder! One can always dream, right?

Well, time is ticking away and I should be getting ready. I must say, just quickly, that I was immensely surprised by the response to this blog and I am very thankful for your support.

Ok. See you on the other side. Bye now.

Thanks for reading!