a white christmas!

yesterday i experienced my first white christmas and it was fantastic!! we woke up and opened the presents in our stockings (we had a secret santa then had to get everyone else $5 stocking fillers). my most memorable was an open bag of skittles from greg, from which he had removed all the red ones - red is my favourite flavour, thanks greg!! haha. then croft cooked us pancakes with real canadian maple syrup for breakfast which was yummy! unfortunately lauren and croft´s church didn´t have a christmas morning service and the sister church was too hard to get to on public transport so we didn´t get to go. instead we spent the morning creating a 6 1/2 foot snowman and an igloo in the front yard, using stevie´s new igloo making mold! when our feet went numb we came in to help with lunch.

lauren cooked up a feast of roast turkey, homemade cranberry sauce (the best ever) and veggies, which we ate at our posh dining setting (on cushions on the floor). after lunch it was back out into the snow, then home to read and nap. we finished off the evening with a cocktail party where the air hockey table was transformed into an aussie-themed bar, and we all dressed up and celebrated. rikki, you would be proud of me, i drank coke! i´ve had it a few times on this trip because you can´t get lemon lime & bitters here, and am even kinda enjoying it!

today we went to the boxing day sales - i did pretty well with my shopping, scoring 4 books and a cd for $5 at the thrift store! as usual i think i´ll be coming home with more books than clothes in my suitcase...i lost patience for shopping after a couple of hours and came home before the others who are still out bargain-hunting. greg and lorinda flew out to la this morning so we´re down to 6 people here and the apartment is feeling a bit empty! we´ll be meeting up with them next week at disneyland though so it wasn´t a big goodbye.

i think i mentioned last time that we were going snowboarding at whistler, and i think i used the words snowboarding and fun in the same sentence. i would like to revise that, since i now associate snowboarding with pain ahead of fun! haha. it was my first try at snowboarding, and it seems that i am not a natural - i spent more time on my butt than standing up! lauren was really patient with me and inched her way down the green run with me without laughing too much at my inability to stop or steer. i was able to stand up and slide down the mountain but whenever i felt like i was going too fast, i´d just fall over because i couldn´t slow down! the worst was the stack i did right at the end, i´d been going quite fast and fell really hard on my knees, and i was so frustrated and it hurt so much that i sat on the mountain and cried. consequently i have blue and brown knees, and my bum still hurts every time i sit down, a week later! the next day none of us girls could move, so we had a few quiet days after our day at whistler! but, aside from the painful falls, snowboarding was pretty fun! greg, lorinda and i stopped a bit early so we could go on the peak to peak gondola, which goes from whistler to blackcomb mountain. it was a very pretty ride, but super cold cos we were sitting still.

i think we chose the coldest day to go to whistler - it was a balmy -22 degrees celcius at the top of the mountain, and that does not include wind chill! they reckon it would have been about -30 with wind chill. it was cold! i had to buy goggles, cos they warned us that any exposed skin would get frostbitten. i had 3 layers of pants and 6 layers of tops, plus gloves, 2 pairs of socks and a scarf wrapped around my neck, nose and mouth. after a while the scarf froze around my mouth from the condensation of breathing on it. the cold didn´t bother me at all while i was snowboarding, you get really warm from the exercise, but at the end when i wasn´t doing anything, it was freezing. my hands were going numb through 2 pairs of gloves. it was an experience though, and i´d still probably take those temperatures in preference to 40 degrees!

we went to the ice hockey on monday night to see the vancouver canucks v the anaheim ducks (mighty ducks!). the canucks games are apparently always sold out, but we managed to get tickets through a youth hostel downtown. there is huge rivalry between those two teams, so there were lots of fights between players and booing from the crowd when the opposition scored, which i thought was a bit rude! i also find it interesting that players are allowed to fight on the ice - if they choose to fight, they both have to throw off their gloves, then the referees let them punch each other til one of them is on the ground. they get penalised for fighting and have to sit on the bench for a few minutes, but it´s allowed. strange concept, doesn´t strike me as very sportsmanlike...the crowd seem to love the punch ups though.

we spent christmas eve afternoon with rellies of the crofts who live just outside of vancouver - getting there was interesting, the hour and a half journey took us three hours because of the snow. the skytrains were all delayed and almost shut down because the tracks become icy, and the buses have to drive really slowly because of road conditions, plus they are overloaded because no one wants to drive their cars (or can´t cos they are buried in snow!). stevie provided entertainment while we were waiting by doing flips into the snow then burrowing through like a mole. it was hilarious! anyway once we finally arrived, we had a great night, their family are lovely and spoiled us with a delicious dinner.

other than that, we´ve been having lots of relaxing times - reading, watching movies (we went to see ´yes man´ the other night, it´s pretty funny!) and having snowball fights. next week we all travel down to los angeles, where we are planning to spend new year at disneyland, and after that lynne and i are going up to san francisco for a few days. hope you all had a great christmas and have a happy new year!

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Part of trip: Canada & US

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