Thursday 7 January 2016

Christmas/New Year Break Pt 1.

Happy New Year!

2 weeks since the last blog, either I’m getting slack or there’s too much going on!  I’ll go with the latter ;)

Since the last blog we’ve had Christmas, New Year’s and 10 glorious days off work. Now it’s back to the daily grind. Need to start planning more fun!

The days off were such a blur. A lot and also not much happened! Some days were pretty lazy and others were full on.

Christmas Day was the quietest Christmas Day ever. It was nice to have such a low key Christmas for a change, although this is my 3rd Christmas away from home and I think it gets a little bit harder every year.

Both my good friend Jess and I realized we didn’t have plans during the day, so we thought we’d better do something rather than sit at home by ourselves! I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Jess yet, but she is also from Brisbane. We met over here though, as we have a mutual friend, however I think I met her at an X Files fundraiser screening a few years ago. But that’s another story for another time. :) We bond over the X Files and our love of going to the movies. We usually try to go to the movies once a week and occasionally we’ll have a road trip away. Anyway, Christmas Day did not feel like Christmas Day. We met up in downtown Vancouver, found a pub and had a “traditional” lunch of turkey sandwich (Jess) and Hawaiian pizza (me). Although it was no prawns, cold salads or bbq it was so lovely to have Christmas with a fellow Aussie. We also went to the movies (shock horror!) and saw Sisters. I highly recommend it if you want a good couple of hours of laughter. That night I went over to my Brazilian friend Marisa’s place for drinks and games with other friends. It was such a fun way to end Christmas day.

It was an early start on Boxing Day as it was time to finally learn how to snowboard! The amazing thing about Vancouver is that there are mountains close enough to access by public transport. Me and 3 other, Omar, Ahmed and Anish are all amateur (aka never been before) snowboarders. We were all keen to learn and found that Mount Seymour had the cheapest lesson, lift, rental deal. So we went there.

We had booked in for a 10.30 lesson. However none of us have a car so had to slum it on public transport! 2 hours later we were finally there. Thank god we took the 10.30 lesson as we had to leave downtown at 7.30 anyway and would not have made the 9.30 one. Anyway, after signing our lives away and getting fitted for gear we found where we were supposed to meet. There were 2 Canadian girls as well as a Californian man also in our class. We had the funniest instructor - a hippie English guy, with long blonde hair, 2 plaits in his beard and a tie-dyed headband. His jokes were so dry which made the lesson fun.

The whole 2 hours were spent on the bunny slope first learning how to go backwards without falling and then forwards. By the end of the lesson, I could finally get down the hill going forwards without falling over…too much!  I have no idea how many times I fell, but it was a lot! I think pretty much every time I went down that damned hill. After lunch, we all decided that we just wanted to practice going forwards and backwards the rest of the afternoon…down the bunny slope and that’s exactly what we did!

By the end of the day, I could kind of master going forwards and actually change direction a little bit. Going backwards…I still struggled with and fell over every time. By the end of the day I found it so exhausting trying to use my whole body weight to stand up. Need to work on that leg strength. We kept going though but we all had enough by 6.30. Not bad for a first day! Definitely keen to try it again (sooner rather than later) and perhaps do another class, to learn a few more skills and maybe progress to a green run!

After falling on my ass so many times I found it really hard to sleep (even though I was exhausted) as my tailbone was SO SORE! It actually still is and there are still many bruises on my legs. But it was worth it!

There’s a lot more to cover so I’ll write a separate entry when I have more time. :)


To be continued…