Finding Nemo, not finding rats

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Over the next few days, we combined resting to recharge the batteries with a bit of sightseeing to check out Calgary’s city centre. First of all I should tell you about Tina & Scott’s place - it is super nice. They live in the North West which is an area of the city which is basically brand new; houses are being built like wildfire. Like most of the houses in the area it is two storied but also has a basement which basically makes it three. The basement has a 42 inch TV in it so it should come as no surprise that I spend large quantities of time down there, especially seeing as before I had a job the Olympics, Wimbledon, and Euro 2008 were all on. The basement also houses a dart board which gets plenty of use.

Because the house is only a few years old it has some nifty features like when you vacuum you connect the vacuum tube into various holes in the wall and all the dust and stuff goes through pipes in the wall into a central tank, also the BBQ outside doesn’t need its own gas bottle as you can connect it straight into the houses gas line. Handy wee ideas. The tropical fish tank though is undoubtedly the focal point that everyone is drawn too. It has nemos, sand dollars, prawns, snails, crabs, star fish and other stuff that I probably don’t even know about all amongst brilliantly coloured coral.

Ok fact time: Calgary is the 3rd largest city in Canada with just over a million people, just how many of these are locals I don’t know, everyone seems to be moving here from all over Canada because they pay well and have a booming oil and gas industry. Due to this industry there are quite a number of high rises in the city centre. Two main rivers flow through Calgary the Bow and the Elbow. Whilst downtown we strolled along the riverbank, it is a hive of activity in the summer with people out walking, running and playing Frisbee, football and more in the parks nearby. The city is very multi-cultural and features a large Chinatown and “Little Italy”.

As well as exploring the city centre, we went for quite a few walks to see our new neighbourhood. It is amazing how very few people walk out in the suburbs, everyone seems to have a car. Because of this fact that everyone has cars coupled with the rapid growth of the city the public transport isn’t great. Coming from London where it is amazing we have found it quite difficult in that respect.

On one of our walks through the nearby golf culb which is very exclusive and would probably cost me a years wages for one round, I saw a fox, on another occasion we saw a grass snake. We also came across a glacial erratic, which wikipedia states is a piece of rock that deviates from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests. "Erratics" take their name from this errant location, having been carried there by glacial ice, often over distances of hundreds of kilometres.

Our local park is just round the corner so we spend quite a bit of time hurling a Frisbee around; we have found it strange how very few people use the park, in NZ or England it would most likely be a hive of activity.

I’m going to finish with the most interesting fact I know about Alberta, which is the province that Calgary is in. It is one of the few places in the world that is basically rat free. Since the 1950’s, the government of Alberta has operated a rat-control program which has been so successful that only isolated instances of wild rat sightings are reported, usually of rats arriving in the province aboard trucks or by rail, pretty crazy huh.

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