Two months in Edmonton

Well, it has been so long since we have done an update on here that I hardly know where to start! It has been over 2 months since we arrived in Edmonton, and we are both settled down into work, and just generally into life in Edmonton. I am working on an International Financial Reporting Standards project for a big linen service company (they provide all the linen cleaning and management for most of the major hospitals and hotels across Canada), and Justin is doing some construction work for a guy who is building a new garage. Overall both are going pretty well – although one thing I have discovered in the different countries I have worked in is that no matter where you do it, work is still work!

I was originally planning on writing separate blog posts for the different weekends we have spent here, but I have come to the conclusion that if I go ahead with that it will be about 3 years before I finish! So I am just going to do a summarized version of this all in one post.

After a day at Mellowdale, we arrived at our new house and met Sharon, our home exchange partner. She is a really friendly, cheerful lady in her early 60s who retired at 50 and has been traveling the world ever since. While most Canadians will rarely get out of North America during their lifetime, Sharon’s travels make even most New Zealanders’ look tame! We spent the first two weeks sharing the house with Sharon, before she headed off to NZ to get settled in our place.

Our first week in Edmonton was largely taken up with catching up on sleep, in between some job hunting, job interviews, the must-do visit to West Edmonton Mall (where we also met up with Paul, Gary & Dolly Townsend who were in Canada for a wedding, and Sonya Helms who is currently living here), and lots of little admin-y things.

On our first Friday night we went to check out the Edmonton Street Performer’s festival. Summer in Edmonton is festival season, and almost every weekend there is something happening. Given that for half the year everything is covered in snow, people really make the most of summer and get out and about as much as they can. The first street performance we saw at the festival was quite cringe-worthy and painful, so we were starting to wonder why we had bothered... But then we picked a few better shows, and saw a great ‘ukulele cover band’ who were quite funny and also even sounded pretty good, a very funny comedian whose claim to fame is catching a cabbage on his head, and some really amazing gymnasts doing some incredible lifts. So it turned out to be a great evening!

Later that night Ben & Anna Byrd arrived at our place after their drive across from Vancouver. We stayed up till the early hours of the morning doing personality quizzes (don’t ask!), and then of course had a major sleep in the next morning. Early afternoon we finally left for the drive down to Calgary to attend the Calgary Stampede. For a much more thorough account of this, see Anna’s entry in their travel blog – http://migratorybyrds.blogspot.com/2009/07/alberta-road-trip-post-2-stampede-and.html. She is much more organised than me and finished this weeks ago! We watched a hypnotist show, wandered round the grounds for a while, and then watched the chuck wagon racing and the big stage show. The four of us stayed the night in High River with Roscoe & Janessa Waddell (although after our very late arrival we didn’t actually meet them until the following morning!), and spent a great day with them on Sunday. After desert at the apartment Karla ???Johnson’s??? shares with a bunch of other girls, we left at about 11pm for the 3 hour drive back to Edmonton.

On the Monday we took Anna and Ben to West Edmonton Mall, where we dragged Anna on the big rollercoaster. Although she only saw about two seconds worth of the track (in between having her eyes squeezed tightly shut!), she did admit that she had enjoyed it (and I don’t think we forced her to say that tooo badly did we?!). We have made a couple more trips to the mall since, but haven’t yet tried out the water park or on any of the other attractions. I think the water park might be a good trip for a cold, miserable day once winter comes along – like spending a day at the beach when it is sub-zero outside! There is a big wave pool, a whole assortment of waterslides, and lots of loungers and beach chairs scattered around the whole area. And even an indoor bungy jump!

Since then, some of our weekends have included the following:

• Two separate visits to 1st and 2nd Didsbury for the weekend, where we met up with a huge bunch of Kiwis (including Glenda Laws, Rene and Janelle, Sam McCarthy, Tim & Krista Plews and a few others), as well as meeting heaps of Canadians as well.
  
• A trip to Jasper for the weekend, where we spent the day kayaking on Maligne Lake. Maligne Lake is a long, narrow glacial lake, about 22km long. You can do multiple day trips up and back, but since we just had the day we kayaked up until about lunchtime, stopped for lunch on a little pebbly beach and basked in the sun for a while, and then headed back. It was a perfect clear morning with barely a cloud in the sky, so the lake was looking stunning, but it clouded over a little around lunchtime so we weren’t too sorry to leave before it started raining.
  

• Glenda came and stayed with us for a few days, and we tagged along with her to an evening with a bunch of young people on the south side of Edmonton. It was great to meet a few friends around the area!
  
• We got a bit of culture at a few plays as part of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival. The first turned out to be a performance by a youth drama group, and was pretty amateurish, but the second was a fantastic one-man show that was a parody of an English teacher giving a lesson on Shakespeare. It was really witty, entertaining and absolutely hilarious! Our third and final show was a guy playing Canadian songs from the 60s on his guitar. Although his singing wasn’t the greatest, his guitar playing was amazing so we really enjoyed it.
  
• One Sunday afternoon we had an impromptu lunch with Dale & Joan Cronin. They had a few other friends over as well, and their son James and his wife Lidia were there since they are currently living with Dale & Joan while their house is getting built. It was a beautiful sunny day, so we had lunch outside and sat and chatted for a few hours. I also borrowed their piano for an hour or so and had my first bash in about three months!
  

• Kelvin & Cynthia arrived in Edmonton on their way home from Europe, after a couple of weeks of road-tripping around the US. They are currently in Saskatchewan helping out with harvest on Ken &Trudy Kerslake’s property there, and will do a bit more traveling through Canada and/or the US before they fly out mid-October. We had a jam-packed weekend while they were here. Friday night we went to Pam & Dan Trisk’s place (Pam is the Kerslakes’ daughter) and cooked sausages and marshmallows round the campfire with a bunch of Pam & Dan’s friends, including her sister Bonnie who Cynthia had got to know in NZ.

• On Saturday morning we got up early and headed out to the Strathcona farmer’s markets, then wandered around Stratchcona which is a cute little arty suburb with lots of historical buildings. We made a flying visit into West Edmonton Mall (where ironically Cynthia & I had trouble dragging the guys out of a homewares shop!), then headed on to Hugh & Donna Derrick’s place for a late brunch. We have got to know Hugh & Donna quite well (we go to their place on Wednesday nights), and they had a group of other young people around as well, so it was great to meet a few more people. After eating way too much (including Lidia’s scrumptious chocolate pancakes with strawberries and cream...) and nearly falling asleep basking in the sunshine, we ducked back home to pack up some camping gear before heading to Elk Island National Park for the evening.
  
  
  
• Elk Island is just a small park only about half an hour from home, and we mostly wanted an excuse to have a campfire for the night! Rather than taking two vehicles Cynthia & I camped out on the futon in the back of the van while we were driving! We had a great evening at Elk Island – lots of lazing around reading books and chatting, a really yummy dinner made even better by the fact that the guys cooked everything, a beautiful sunset, and a great chat around the campfire.

• On Sunday morning we headed back into Edmonton, and then Sunday evening went to Steve & Amber Ramage’s place for dinner. We met Steve & Amber while they were traveling through NZ, and then also caught up with them on the Aussie part of their trip while we were in Aussie for the wedding, so it was great to see them again. They had just arrived home to Edmonton about a week earlier after nearly a year away (which is pretty unusual for Canadians!). They had a few of their good friends over as well, so it was great to get to know them too. All up we met way more people in one weekend than we had in nearly 2 months up to that point!
  

• We drove to Calgary & back last Saturday to check out the World Skills competition which was being held there. Justin competed in this competition in Switzerland about 6 years ago, so was keen to go and check it out. After having heard him talk about it for years, I was really interested to see what it was all about too. The competition is kind of like the Olympics of trade, and has something like 47 different categories, with competitors from a huge range of different countries. It is the largest independent event ever to be held at the Calgary Stampede grounds, so that says something about the scale of it. Justin caught up with a couple of Kiwis who had been in Switzerland with him. I hadn’t had very much sleep the night before so I got over all the standing around and walking a bit earlier than what Justin did(!), but all up it was a great day. There were some really interesting categories to watch – seeing the best in the world create masterpieces in floristry, graphic design, fashion (they were making wedding dresses), and possibly the most impressive, the pastry chefs whose major project was a decorated ‘cake’ – most of them were more like intricate chocolate sculptures rather than what you would typically think of as a cake!
  

And finally, our latest weekend was a trip to Canmore, just a few minutes from Banff. We picked a fantastic weekend for it with perfect weather – literally not even a wisp of a cloud in the sky all weekend. Canmore is a really cute alpine town just outside the national park, so it is surrounded by absolutely stunning scenery. It has a great atmosphere – feels quite a lot like Queenstown. We stayed in a campground just outside of Canmore.

On Saturday morning I dropped Justin off at the Nordic Centre which is surrounded by mountain bike trails (as well as horseriding, snow shoeing and cross-country skiing trails, at the appropriate time of year), and then headed up to Lake Louise and Moraine Lake.

After parking nearly a kilometre from the lake since the carpark had well and truly overflowed, I trekked in with my camera gear, which I was quite excited about since it was my new camera’s first proper outing and also the first time I had had a chance to use my new wide-angle lens. Moraine Lake is a glacial lake surrounded by sheer rugged mountains known as the Valley of the Ten Peaks. Next to the lake there is a lookout known as the Rockpile, which is literally just that, a pile of rocks. I had read about the Rockpile but never actually been there before (on our first trip to Moraine Lake we didn’t know it existed), and I didn’t realise that there is actually a track up it. So instead I copied the handful of other people who were climbing up the boulders to get to the top. I found a good lookout, got my camera set up, framed up a shot of this absolutely stunning lake, and pressed the shutter... only to have a message come up on my camera screen saying “No card”... Justin had taken the memory card out of my camera about a week earlier to transfer some files from the computer, and had forgotten to put it back in again!! So there I was, in possibly the most beautiful place I have ever been to, on the most perfect day you could possibly imagine, AND I COULDN’T USE MY CAMERA!!!!!! Needless to say I was a little bit grumpy for a while after that!

Eventually I trekked back to the car, got out our little compact camera, walked back to the lake and climbed back up the Rockpile (it was on my way down the second time that I discovered the track!), and started taking some photos with the compact camera. Then just as I got to the main lookout, the camera’s only battery went flat!!

In the afternoon (after I got over my grumpy period!), we lazed around the campground in the sunshine, reading books and eating way too much, then sat round the campfire at night. In all our camping through the States it was the first time we’d been in a spot long enough to make it worthwhile having a campfire (other than our trip with Kelvin & Cynthia which was almost solely for that purpose). We had a meeting just out of Canmore the next morning, then headed back to Moraine Lake for attempt number two. I bought what was meant to be a cheap memory card from Canmore before we left, and ended up dealing with the dodgiest sales rep in a creepy little shop who literally refused to scan the price of the 1GB memory card for me! He spent ages trying to convince me to buy an 8GB card, while I explained that I literally only wanted it for a couple of hours because I had left my proper one at home. He was raving about what a good deal the card was, and how the 4GB and 2GB cards were the same price anyway so I might as well get the big one. He quoted a price for the 4GB one, then scanned the barcode which came up about $20 cheaper... and then did the same for the 2GB one. After watching him lie about the price of both of those, I kept asking him to scan the 1GB one, and he flatly refused!! He told me what the price was going to be on it but wouldn’t actually scan it to confirm. I told him I would take that one anyway, figuring he’d have to scan it to sell it to me, but instead he typed the price he’d quoted into the computer! Since so many people had told me that his shop was the only place in Canmore to buy memory cards, I eventually just gave in and bought it at his price, but I left the shop fuming!

Moraine Lake on a perfect sunny day could hardly fail to cheer anybody up though, so my mood improved drastically over the course of the afternoon! We got there a little later in the afternoon than the previous day and the sun was a bit low in the sky for decent photos, but still, it was better than nothing! We drove home via a different route (the Saskatchewan Crossing) and were amazed and how beautiful the scenery was along there. So I definitely did get my money’s worth out of my memory card in spite of being ripped off!

Overall it was such a great weekend, and it made us really keen to spend more time around Canmore. Justin wasn’t too impressed with the mountain biking there (the tracks are tailored as much for horseriding and winter sports as they are for mountain biking), but it is such a nice town and surrounded by so many awesome attractions that you could spend weeks there without running out of things to do. Bring on Christmas there with Ben & Anna (hopefully!)!! :-)

More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/canadianmport/Edmonton02?authkey=Gv1sRgCIO44p6m9OuvpgE#

I have finally managed to take some pics of our house in Edmonton, so there will be another post coming along shortly!