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Published: February 11th 2008
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nacho bake
a culinary delight, its like eating nachos, but its pasta, and its baked, but its not crunchy. I have found my winter sport.
I left Australia all excited to go to Canada, with dreams and plans of learning how to be the world's best skier/snowboarder/any type of winter sports person. I mean, being so close to snow and everything, you kind of just have to do it. No wasted opportunities, et cetera, et cetera.
Unfortunately, over the last few weeks I have come to the painful sad and disappointing realisation that I am just not cut out for winter sports, for a number of reasons.
One.
I hate the stupid shoes. Ice skating, skiing, it doesn't matter, they hurt. Maybe cause I don't know how tight I am supposed to do them up. I don't care. I don't like it. They hurt me, and after my skiing adventures, I had sore ankles for a week. I think I really did do them up too tight.
Two.
Little children. Ruining my life. Especially on the ski-fields. Its not my fault they have been skiing since they were 56 hours old and have a low centre of gravity. They get in my way, but more importantly, they are about sixty million times better than me, and
Dave outside the quinzhee
clearly inferior to the igloo I cry with jealousy. And as for the little kids on the ice rink, I am scared of them getting in my way and I running over their fingers. Parents, please ensure your children are wearing gloves when they go on the ice rink.
Three.
I fall over way too much. No more need be said. I'm just happy I wasn't hospitalised with hypothermia after my stack down the ravine on Mt Tremblant. More importantly, me and my non-waterproof gloves almost got frost bite, after they were soaking wet and then the temperature dropped down to -20. Ow.
Four.
Oh yeah. I don't know how to snowboard.
All that being said, I do like ice skating. After I get into it.
But here is the bomb shell. I have found not one, but two winter sports that I enjoy. The first is cross country skiing. I spent the last weekend at a house owned by the McGill "Outdoor Club" in a little town about an hour and a half out of Montreal. It was awesome just getting away from everything here, it was so relaxing that even the air felt tranquil. Today we went
breakfast time
me looking delightful as usual cross country skiing and I really enjoyed it (once I reached what everyone likes terming my "peak performance rate", and actually managed to get the whole slidey thing going). It is a great low intensity endurance sport, just my thing.
Secondly, however, and more importantly, I have found what may not just be my second winter sport, but quite possibly my life calling. As Dave, Mia and I trudged our way back into the Outdoor Club's yard this afternoon, we came upon our new found friends from the night before's shenanigans, undertaking a massive project in the front yard:
Igloo building.
Now I will have to begin with explaining the difference between an igloo and a quinzhee (pronounced Kinsey). As we arrived at the house on Saturday evening, a quinzhee which had been built several weeks before was residing in the front yard. A quinzhee is essentially a hollowed out cave in a pile of snow, made by throwing a bunch of backpacks on the ground, packing snow around it, and then burrowing out a hole and pulling the backpacks out, resulting in a hollowed out heap of snow (I'm not insinuating that thats the way the
Eskimos did it, but it works), which is good for temporary shelter, or wasting time building on a Saturday night when you are in a little town in the middle of Quebec with nothing to do. Dave and I found it necessary to crawl in there at some point on Saturday night, and sit around for about two minutes before realising that we couldn't even sit up properly, there was nothing to do in there, and we needed some fresh air.
Now an igloo, my dear friends, is a much bigger operation. We had about eight of us doing assorted jobs: engineering the igloo, shovelling snow to be used for bricks, creating bricks using a recycling container, laying the bricks, packing snow around the cracks, interior decorating, building a tunnel between the quinzhee and our new, premium snow structure, documenting the entire event. I have never had more fun in my life. Unfortunately, just as we were beginning on the roof, the difficult slanting in part, we were called inside by the ice-climbers to help with the house clean up. After we all stood around for a sufficiently long enough time to look as if we were doing a
lot of work (I actually did clean the stove and the bathroom), our new friends had to depart for an evening snow-boarding trip on the nearby Mt (fill in gap), and us poor Australians were left bemoaning the fact that we never learnt the necessary igloo building skills to finish it off, mainly due to the lack of snow in Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne. I should take this point to mention that Tim, the boy directing the entire project, is actually from Florida.
Alas, our unfortunate, pitiable igloo will stand half built until the snow disappears sometime in March or perhaps even in April unless some bored soul does take pity on it and decides to finish the job that we had no choice but to leave undone. Who knows, maybe another trip to that little town of which noone seems to know the name will be planned, so that we can spend some time digging out fallen snow and finish our masterpiece.
Only time, and another cross country skiing trip, will tell.
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Ally
non-member comment
Do want those nachos!! YUM. Ally