Comments

We have had some requests to explain how to comment. In hopes of boosting our comment count I'm posting this:

If someone has comments enabled on his or her blog, then you can usually find a "comments" link at the end of each post, like this:

If you click this link, you will go to the comment posting page. (Note: in some templates, this link may take you to the post page first. From there you should be able to find the "Post a Comment" link which will take you here.) The comment posting page looks like this:
In the upper left corner, there is an option to show or hide the original blog post that the comments relate to. The rest of the left-hand column contains any comments that have already been made. The profile photos of the comment authors may also display, depending on the blog's settings.
On the right hand side of the page is the space for you to enter your comment. Beneath that are the identity options. (Some of these may not be available, depending on the blog's settings.)

The options are these:

• Blogger username: Your display name will appear, along with a link to your profile and your photo (if you have one).
• Other: You can enter your name and a link to your website, without having to have a Blogger account.
• Anonymous: No identifying information is displayed. The comment is credited to "Anonymous" without a link.

The owner of a blog also has the option to have comments open in popup windows. In this case, all the primary features will still be present, just arranged a little differently:

Christmas day

Because of our work schedule and so that we had Christmas the same day as everyone in NZ, we had our Christmas on the 24th. As our Christmas present Sam's mum bought us a night in the Marriot, so we stayed there for Christmas eve, which was pretty fun. This was the view of North Vancouver from our room (note the olympic ring lights on the barge in the harbour).

We could even see our work from our room. This is a run called The Cut and the wind turbine The Eye of the Wind.

After some swimming in the hotel pool we went out for Christmas eve dinner, which since I haven't been paid yet, couldn't be very fancy. This is what we had:
Bottomless pepsi:

Burgers with bottomless steak fries:

And HEAPS of onion rings:

Then with the leftovers we could make the olympic rings!

The next morning we woke up and it was Christmas!

It wasn't a white Christmas unfortunately (the weather man said it only happens once or twice every 10 years). We opened presents, put on our Christmas outfits, then had a champange breakfast, or rather a metodo tradicional breakfast.

 

This is one of Sam's presents I made:

On our way back home, we stopped at the supermarket, and were considering buying some eggnog, but because it sounds gross we asked the guy working there what it tasted like. He opened it up and made samples for us.

This is what Sam thought of it:

We didn't buy any.

After that we went home where we had lots of Christmas mail waiting for us! This is what we got from Sophie and Mike to remind us of home, very cool.

Then we made some gingerbread men to take to work for everyone who has to work Christmas with us.

All in all a good day. It's pretty different having Christmas over here, it's strange that it doesn't signify the holiday season. People are still at school and uni, no one has work holidays, and we're really busy at work. It's fun to have change and have a winter Christmas like on TV, and to have everything be so Christmassy and pretty.

Stanley Park

Today we explored our neighbourhood & it is full of magic.



English Bay is where the cities inhabitants swim in the warmer months. English Bay Beach is the most popular & closest to us. Really nice looking water, can't wait to Hitro Okesene it when summer comes around.





Stanley Park is Vancouver's big park & it is really big & we almost got lost in it's 200kms of poorly signed trails. It is a mystical place full of mist & monsters. Here is a fresh-wood crocodile that we were scared of but then Sara wrangled it & it was instantly tamed.





All of the interior paths are cut amongst spectacular native timbers.



While Paris has poodles & New Zealand have sheep; Vancouver has equestrians. Pretty sure this is where Mark Todd buys his coke.



There are a lot of trees in the park that have completely uprooted and fallen over. A sign informed us that this is good for the animals that live there but we weren't sure so we asked one.



Beaver Lake is a scary lake inside Stanley Park filled with dangerously placid water & misty birds of venom.



Sam was very brave to approach the Arrowheaded Sparrows with peacefully outstretched arms but wisely retreated with haste when they attacked him in a swarming pack. Unflinching.

Apartment

This isn't very interesting but these are some photos of our little apartment, its a studio apartment so it pretty much one room. Apart from the bathroom, which I didn't bother taking photos of because it just looks like any bathroom..

This is the sleeping part:

It is a furnished apartment, but we bought the linen. Note the sweet duvet we got. Very Canadian

Cooking part:



Dining/living part:

Another view:

And that's pretty much it.

On another note we posted all our Christmas presents back to our families today. We were warned that Canadian Post is very slow, but didn't realise how slow. When we posted something from the US it was 15-20 days, here delivery time is estimated to be 8 weeks. So no one should excitedly checking the mail box each day or anything.. Until the 15th of Feb.

Today Show

Today I(Sara) was working, when I got a call saying to go upstairs to do a zipline tour, so I did. Ziplines are kind of like flying foxes but you're harnessed in and don't need to hang on. There are 5 runs on Grouse of varying lengths and speeds and over various kinds of terrain. It turned out that the tour was for NBC and will be on the Today show which is some show in America (and SkyTV I think? Maybe not) and it will be used as the worldwide olympic promo, and NBC has the biggest worldwide coverage of the olympics. So hopefully they don't cut me out, and you might get to see me. They are filiming the Today Show throughout the olympics at Grouse so I guess they might get more footage, but hopefully not! I didn't get to take any photos, but this is basically what it looked like:

That's me and Scott Swann, who is a reporter from Indianapolis. I'm not sure why someone from there is filming it. I don't even know where that is.
Ziplining was so cool. It was great weather to do it. Since we've been working there we've had nothing but sunshine, so it was an awesome view over all of Vancouver and the harbour. On one line you go 80km per hour and travel for about 1 min, and you traverse this valley so you're up quite high, about 100m. Its definitley my favourite thing on the mountain so far, and would totally be worth paying the $100 or so for it.
So keep a look out for me!

Christmas time

Its pretty christmassey here in Vancouver. These are some of the christmas things we've been up to. On Friday I (Sara) worked as Santa's helper which was pretty fun. I don't have any photo's of that, but Santa's workshop is pretty cool. Its this little hut that is used for renting snow shoes the rest of the year but at christmas has heaps of lights, nutcrackers, decorations and Santa added to make it look really cool and people can get their photo's taken with Santa if they make a donation.

On Sunday we went to the Santa Claus Parade, but it was really long and cold, so we didn't end up waiting for the end to see Santa, we did however see the olympic mascotts

This guy is my favourite. He's a sasquatch

This is Miss New Westminster. I guess they didn't have a lot of entrants this year..

This is Sam's christmas cupcake

And this is him destroying it..




This is our little chirstmas tree


Last night (Monday) we wen't to see the lights in Stanley Park which is a park near our house



This is the lake freezing over in the park. It's kind of hard to see

Even the racoons are getting into christmas, this one is eating a candy cane

Grouse Mountain

Yesterday we had our first day of work which was basically an overview of the running the mountain and today we started our actual training. We arrive at the base of the mountain and catch a skyride tram 1100m up to the ski fields. The two days we've been up there it has been so clear and incredibly scenic, but we hear it's often foggy so I guess we've been lucky.

The actual resort itself is so cute and I guess it looks just like you would expect a north american ski field would at Christmas.

For Christmas there is a Santa's workshop with Santa and elves, ice skating, a theatre showing Christmas movies, reindeer, Christmas themed coffees at starbucks, and so many fun decorations.

The company seems pretty cool to work for. Everyone in our department seems quite fun. It's pretty cool that we get trained for a whole week, I'm sure the most training I've had for a job is a day, so we should know what we're doing by the time we actually start. Today we had a tour of the peak with snowshoes (those things that look like tennis rackets) and tomorrow we start the day with an hour or two of snowboarding. Eek! I hope we (mainly I(Sara)) don't hold everyone up too much. A couple of people have only done it a couple of times before but they use much more technical lingo than we do so I think they must be a lot more advanced.

So it seems like our job will be pretty fun and fairly laid back. We will be making the most of our discounts and free passes. It seems like even if you never learnt to ski or snowboard you could still have heaps of fun over the season because there's so much to do.

Vancouver

The day after we got here, we had this orientation thing with the company we came here through, which just told us about how to get bank accounts, cell phones, where to live, etc. Then we went house hunting. We had no idea where to live, and had no idea Vancouver was as big as it is. We started our search near where we work in North Vancouver, but it kind of lacked the big city feel, so we decided we didn't really like any if those, so we focused our search more on the city, deciding to travel further. After visiting a lot of places, including some weird one with this old guy who would be living in the living room, we settled on an area and found somewhere. So if anyone wants to write to us, send it to:

Suite 5
1339 Barclay St
Vancouver, BC, V6E 1H6
Canada.

It's pretty fun. It's furnished, so we don't have to worry about that and its only about 2 or 3 blocks from downtown and in the other direction is a beach and massive park, so it should be pretty good. Also it happens to be in the block the Incredible Hulk was filmed, and pretty near where Changeling was filmed. Famous. Everything happens monthly in terms of accommodation, so we have to wait until the 1st (its the 28th here) so a couple more nights in a hostel. Anyway, now that we've sorted where we are going to live we can get to know the city and do some fun things. First on my list is buy gumboots.

Last days of the USA

We haven't written any thing in a while. We've been pretty busy trying to find somewhere to live, which we did tonight! Hooray!
We spent our last day in San Fran looking around the Haight Ashbury district which was pretty fun.

There are heaps of fun looking houses, and the Golden gate park, which is massive, is near by so it was pretty cool, we saw a bit of wildlife there.

We caught a Greyhound over night to Portland, and we thought it would be a good idea to get some sleeping pills before we did. It wasn't. For some reason they made us both really restless and fidgity, so neither of us got much sleep. 16 hours later we arrived in Portland.
Portland was really nice. It was very scenic and clean. They have a really good public transport system thats free so we got to see all off the city. They have this aerial tram that goes from one part of the health and science University to another which we went on and got to see some pretty good views including Mt St Helens. We didn't get up to too much, we just looked around the town, ate in some cool all American Diners that sort of thing. We thought of going to the Trailblazers (basketball) but they were sold out.

On Thursday the 26th it was thanksgiving which is pretty much like Christmas, everything is closed and everyone is going to see their families, so we decided not to stick around for that as it didn't really mean much to us, so we had booked our bus tickets for Vancouver for then. We set out in the morning, struck HEAPS of traffic. In the middle of nowhere there was just tons of cars, all going to their families, all at about 40kms an hour. On our bus was this weird guy who had something wrong with him, who took a liking to this Army guy – Captain Eric Carter. He was right behind us and chatted the whole time to The Captain about all this strange stuff, apart from one hour when he locked himself in the toilet. I was worried he would decapitate us once The Captain left, but he didn't. Once we left Seattle everything was fine, only about 7 people on our bus and no traffic. When we crossed the border, this girl on our bus, who had been on the bus for 3 days got denied entry. She was coming to visit a guy she met on the internet who she hadn't seen before, was planning on being there for 3 months and had $200 and no job. I guess I would have denied her entry too, but I felt sorry for her. Once we got to Vancouver we were pretty hungry since everything had been closed in the US. All I wanted was Gerry's quiche and crunchy potatoes, but I couldn't have them. Gutted. But we had finally arrived, so I cheered up and we started exploring the city.