White Christmas

So, we've finally had a white Christmas, and I only had to wait 22 years! We had a really great day with everyone playing monopoly, and a great dinner - which Robyn mostly cooked on her own, with an awesome Mars bar cheesecake made by Renee. Me, Robyn and Garry went for a little bit of a snowboard on Christmas Day too, which is something we might never get to do again. Robz wasn't up there too long, but she still did it.

We've been on the phone a lot the last couple of days, so we won't write too much here, but we really had a great Christmas, the first set of photos have just gone up, but both of our cameras died at around lunchtime, so we'll have to get more of the evening off the other guys in the house. Some are a little older pictures, but they're all Christmas-y.

Lots of Love
Jon and Robyn

Brrrrr!

Cold, cold, cold!

In bed with long socks, jeans, fleece and beanie on! We're both well, more to follow when Jon is in because I cant type very well!

Love Robyn x

Uh-Oh

Hi everyone, this is Jon typing because Robyn can't... she broke her wrist yesterday :( Sucks quite a lot really, could take up to 6 weeks to heal fully, but hopefully it'll be faster than that. It's quite a small hairline fracture of the left radius at the wrist, but apparently it's very painful.

Most annoyingly, it happened on a pretty flat part of a run, just after she'd made it down a very long steep pitch, she caught an edge (when the board digs under the snow a little) and fell over backwards onto her arm. Ski Patrol were very good, and she got to ride the toboggan down to the gondola and on to the clinic. They were also very nice, but now we have the fun of getting our money back through the insurance company, which is not going to be fun, and I get to do a lot of work in the meantime.

The day got a little bit worse when our boss/landlord came over to take away our massive TV and replace it with another massive TV, only this isn't widescreen and is a bit broken - the tube is on the way out and it flickers a lot unless you use picture in picture and don't use the full screen. Still, it's not so bad really and we just watched Wall-E, which was good.

Jonjon and brokeded Robrob

Oooowwww

No blog for a while because we've been boarding/sleeping/working. This has been a painful week! Had my first board lesson which didnt go so great, and I went out yesterday too which after a shaky start was actually pretty good, and I'm starting to do turns a little bit now. Theres still not that much snow up on the mountain and what is up there isn't really good, its still pretty icy in some places which hurts when I fall down! But I'm starting to get it and Jon is improving a lot too. We've just been very achey and I hurt my knee a bit.

But now that the mountain is open we have something to do! We're just waiting for more snow now, so we're still being all impatient! The picture above is from the Roundhouse, which is where you get off all the chairlifts and the gondola on Whistler mountain. This was at the weekend on American thanksgiving so thats why there are so many people there - its normally busy but not that bad! There are only a few runs open which makes it busier too. But hopefully the snow will come.

Our house is all settled in now and apart from Felix who is from Germany we are totally outnumbered by Aussies - 2 boys and 3 girls. But everyone gets on really well. We went out for Renees 22nd birthday to a club in town called Maxx Fish which was cool, and Jon finally got hold of Guitar Hero World Tour (which our friend picked up in Vancouver two days after I went round the whole city looking for it!) which has drums and a mic as well as the guitar so we were all playing that till half three last night.

Fun times :)

Hope everyone is looking forward to Christmas xxx

More boarding

I took Robyn up on the mountain again today, to do a bit more practicing before she gets a proper lesson, passing on my extremely limited knowledge... It was super busy today, it's American Thanksgiving weekend and a loooooot of people are up here for it. We did take the camera though, so here's a picture of Robz on her gear and strapped in, apologies for the finger in the photo but it was cold so it was just a quick snap!

Unfortunately it's all a bit warm at the moment and it's raining in the alpine rather than snowing, which means not only are the limited trails really busy, the snow isn't in great shape either. Still... we've got a whole season to look forward to, which is a nice thought while all the Yanks are moaning about going home!

Jon

Snowboarding!

Jon took me out on the mountain today to do some falling over. I fell over a lot let than expected (the padded shorts we bought were a very good investment though!) and I can kind of turn both ways. I didnt go on a run though, just played about on the baby slope by the ski school. My friends who live with us who havent went boarding did go down on a run and apparently didnt do so great, so I'm glad I didnt go down! Feeling confident before my lessons though. Jon did some runs and we are both very achey! Yay.

Theres no snow down here yet, and apparently not that much on the mountain (not that I would know... Someone else asked me what the snow was like... How do I bloody know? Its white and cold?) but we'll get you all some snowy pics soon.

Love yooooou :) xxx

Nearly there!

The mountain FINALLY opens on Wednesday! The lift near us doesn't open till Thursday, so we'll probably wait to go up until then. Jons board is all ready and we'll get mine set up tonight. We think that I'll be riding 'goofy,' which is board-speak for the wrong way round :|

We bought some very fetching padded bum shorts today so we dont break our arse bones when we inevitably fall down, which will probably happen a lot. I have never had so much sports equipment in my life! (Board, boots, ski jacket and 2xpants, bum shorts, thermals, helmet, gloves and googles, ice skates... this scares me!) Jon bought a rather fetching skull cap (for under his helmet) and I got an actually fetching thermal jumper.

No real snow down here in the valley yet but it wont be too long now. It snowed a little the other day and it hasn't all melted yet. So soon!

Granny, we think we have your parcel. We'll be posting our Christmas stuff home this week xxx

Lots of love,
Robyn and Jon

:(

"Whhhyyyyyyyyyyyyy won't it snooooooooooow
Like they said it wooooooooooould?"


JonJon got hit on the head by a saucepan today and has a nice red mark that will probably turn into a nice black eye.

In other news, there is no other news. Everyone is waiting for the mountain to open and everyone has no money to do much else! The mountain was going to open next Thursday, and then it was this Saturday, and now its next Thursday again. Sigh. Oh well, gives me another payday until I have to buy lessons. Some friends have offered to show me the basics so I can go out as soon as it opens but then I'm definitely going to need some more professional help! Jon's going to go out and see how he goes because he's boarded before. Our boss gave us some helmets today (which I will be decorating with my Star Wars stickers - I got a shiny Obi Wan, fanks Mum) so the only thing we need to get is some bum padding.

Lots of Love

Robyn and poorly-face Jon x

Redneck

We have deer pepperoni. Our boss shot the deer.

Pictures

As per request, here are the photos from when we went out in the snow... shame it's all gone but it'll be back pretty soon.

All gone :(

So we had one day of snow... more snow than I've seen for a very, very long time and more snow than our female Aussie housemates had seen ever... and one day of slush. Its pretty warm again now for November, but I hope to God it starts snowing again soon because we just bought our lift passes! Yaaay! We also bought some awesome Sorel boots for the winter... very warm, snuggly and waterproof. So, we're pretty much all set and just waiting... and its worse because it actually has snowed!

Our house is all full now. There are three guys in the room next to us, and three girls downstairs, so the house is pretty full but everyone is pretty tidy so the house looks okay considering there is eight of us! Apart from us there are four Aussies, one guy and three girls, a German guy and a Japanese guy and everyone is pretty nice. Two of the Aussie girls haven't boarded before so I have someone in the same boat as me! We're gonna get some lessons together, methinks.

Jon is at work right now, so I'm making peanut butter cookies and then I'm going to put some new grip on my snowboard. Also, we might be going to see some hockey next week. It'll cost us more than $100 but hey, it'll be fun.

Robyn xxxxxxxx

Snow in the valley!

It's finally snowing down here! it's going to stop for a little while, but soon it'll be snowing every day and we'll start having to dig out the windows... Yay

Snow on the mountains

The rain in the valley stopped for a while this afternoon and when the clouds broke you could see the snowline had come a long way down the mountain. There was still an hour or two of daylight left so we went outside and ventured a little way up the mountain along the Creekside Gondola and took some photos.

We also walked along the river a little looking for a rumoured beaver dam, but we didn't find any.

All Hallows' Eve

Been quite a quiet week here, and the rain has set in now - forecast says that the temperature should be dropping to freezing over the next few days and the snowline should start creeping down the mountain. We've met some people via the internet too - Ally from Scotland (not to be confused with Ali, our manager) his girlfriend Karen and some of his friends who we partied with on hallowe'en. The photos from various hallowe'en stuff are here and some are on facebook too!

We carved our Meowth pumpkin Thursday afternoon, which came out totally awesome! Unfortunately we forgot to get any candles so it didn't really get the most made of it... it looked good when we tried it out with a torch though. Then Thursday night while I was at work Robyn went to Ally's place and carved some more pumpkins with him and Karen, Robyn made a Nightmare Before Christmas pumpkin with Jack and Oogie Boogie. Meanwhile Karen carved Batman and Ally made a more traditional scary face.

Friday we were finishing off our costumes, while Ali was making his awesome robot - unfortunately we didn't see it in action because we were out with Ally instead, but apparently it got traded with a girl and cross-dressed Ali ended up winning a costume award. Instead we were out with Ally, who was dressed as a white wolf, Karen and some of their friends including Raine, who went as Robin Hood, which made for some fun introductions.

Before we went into town to go to a club Ally took Robyn and myself down to Easy Street, which is a little closed off neighbourhood where all the houses are made up for hallowe'en. All the locals donate money to the street, and then all the local kids are taken there for the trick or treating. It's a fantastic place, kinda like something outta the movies, pretty much all of the outside pictures are from there, there were some amazing pumpkins and some really good decorations. Quite a few of the houses give out mulled wine and hot cider to adults instead of candy too, which is very popular.

After that, we went into town and into a club, which was pretty good, kind of like a mixture between Fez in Cambridge and Route in Portsmouth, for the few people who are reading this who have been in both... Probably more like Fez though to be honest, all on one floor with more dancefloor than seating. We were pretty boring all in all, and were home by 2am, passing up on the opportunity to go the somewhat infamous Full Moon Party, which you can only find out where it is by calling a cab and asking to go there.

We didn't get a great nights sleep even though we came home pretty early though, because the heating in our house is broken and stuck on... so it was really really hot inside last night. It's turned off at the fuse tonight, so it'll probably be too cold, but Ali is going to fix the thermostat tomorrow.

Enough rambling, hope everyone is well and had a good hallowe'en at home!

Jon

No work, Cultural centre

So we finally got two nights off from the diner which was very nice... The overtime was certainly needed but having a night off together is good too!

We wanted to go skating yesterday but we never seem to be able to make it on time! So we decided to go to the Skwxwύ7mesh Lil'wat7ul (Squamish-Lil'wat) Cultural Centre. The Squamish and Lil'wat peoples are two groups who live along the east coast, and thier territories overlap in Whistler. They used to fight over whose territory it was, but they eventually decided they both owned it, and recentley the cultural centre was built here. The centre was really good, it had lots of art, canoes, sculptures, native clothing, etc. You get to see a film and a tour, which was really good. All the people who work there are native, which was cool as a lot of the people in the photos in the centre were the tour guides family and ancestors. There was so many legends and stories, but my favourite was probably that they believe that mountains were once people. People or places got tranformed into mountains when they did or represented something good. We also made bracelts out of cedar bark; the cedar tree is very crucial to thier culture as it provides clothing, bedding, shelter, hats, jewellery, etc. Jon was better than mine :)
Anyway, it was really good and when we're richer we'll be going back to spend a lot of money, probably! The guy up top there is on a sea canoe, and represents a brother was changed into stone after he saved his brothers. The hole in his mouth is for a sail. You can see more photos of the centre here.

After that we deviated from our diet of diner food and went the The Brewhouse for... well, pizza and chicken and beer, which was pretty similar to what we eat at work! (See, Granny, I told you we were eating well!) But it was good to relax and not be in the diner!

Still not snowing.

Robyn (eating peanut-butter coated maltesers)

:|

Jon got given Jagermeister by a native and then went and blew 400 bucks on an X-box.


Oh.
Dear.

Argh! Bear!

So we just bumped into a mummy bear with her two cubs on the way home from the Husky (24 hour gas station) after work... Pretty scary at night, she kinda appeared on us so we just talked to her and backed away as you're supposed to.

Kinda scary, and our first real test of bear awareness, but we're both fine and the bears were happy to leave us alone so long as we left them alone - they're really quite timid so long as you neither startle nor threaten them. More than doubled our bear count right there!

Rain, rain, rain...

Well, we're both over our illnesses now and feeling okay again. Getting excited about the snow now.... although all the rain keeps melting away any snow that lands on the mountain which is bloody frustrating!

We've signed up to get our lift passes now- we're not going to bother with the volunteer thing. Because we wouldnt be able to do any work outside on the mountain and its not going to be a good experience, build our boarding skills or become something that we could put on our C.V., we're just going to buy the passes. It means we'll probably be poor - ok, we'll definitely be poor - until Christmas, but when it starts snowing we wont really be doing a lot else. But it works out about 600 quid for the whole season, and we'll probably do a hundred days of boarding. It sounds better when you say six pounds a day than twelve hundred dollars! We're doing some overtime at the diner at the moment though so hopefully it'll all be good!

At least with the rain and no money, its hockey season so there's good stuff to watch on t.v (and hockey season is a LOT of hockey!)We both like the Canucks, Vancouvers NHL team a lot and hopefully we'll get the chance to see them at some point.

Unless you want to see a whole bunch of rain in which case I can probably sort you out, we dont really have any pretty pictures for you. But here are some pics of some lovely Canadian candy, because as all we know the confectionary abroad is very, very crucial. Unfortunatley there are no pictures of Clodhoppers, which are yummy fudge-coated cracler clusters... Mmmm. Lots of Wonka, Hersheys (looooove Reeses Pieces!) and different Cadburys bars here too. FYI, those slushies are not the biggest, and they cost about a pound. They're like frozen coke, not slush puppies, so we've probably been drinking too many.


Robyn xxx

P.S.... Will somebody please give my love to Gruff?

Getting more gear...

Today we headed down to the Turkey Sale in the village which is the annual clear-out that all the ski and board shops here have at Thanksgiving (which is on Monday, its a month earlier than the USA. We guess its because harvest is earlier, but hey. We know nothing.). I've already got a board and Jon picked up a really nice ex-rental board for $100 and we're going to go get some bindings tomorrow. Theres a snowboard factory down the road thats having a sale and a factory tour tomorrow which should be pretty cool. We're also going to get a couple of shitty boards to learn on so we don't wreck our good ones (for y'all old people, when it starts to snow, you can really bugger your board up because theres still rocks sticking up) and we should be able to get some for about thirty bucks. Anyway, I bought gloves and thermals and some little metal stars to stick on my board for grip. I spent $142 I can't really afford but I'm all set for the whole season now.

Also today: Bear no. 2 - About bloody time. He was a teeny little bear - so teeny I didn't even notice he was there! Jon was like, theres a bear! I was like... what? He was just outside our house down the side, nomming something and generally being uninterested. I got some crappy photos of him.

Anyway, its starting to get bloody cold. Will probably not be doing too much this week as I spent all my pay on sweeeeeet gear (and Hallowe'en costume!) Also, we might have to pay for our season passes because we can't apply for any boarding-related volunteer positions as we were idiots and told them we were novices. There are some other positions, but they're really shit front-of-house restaurant jobs (read: cleaning up peoples crap) and so if we dont get good enough benefits we'll just suck it up and buy the pass. Our work has a scheme you can get the pass for $1300 and it usually costs $1900. So while thats not ideal, if we dont get free lessons which you would with other volunteer positions, we dont really want to do the same sort of rubbishy job we're doing already. No free beer? Pffffft.

Robyn xxx

C-c-cold

Cold night tonight! Right now it's 3C in the valley and it's only 10.30pm, so it's going to get colder. It's -8 at the peak, and it's snowy up there! There are webcams at various points up there, check them out.

Jon

Getting paid and buying gear!

We got paid!!! Last Friday we got our first paycheques, and they are actual cheques too, rather than bank deposits. So, to celebrate we went down the re-use it centre to look for some gear and Robyn found a rather nice board and bindings. There's another picture here, along with some pictures of Eddie (Doug's dog, we'll miss him when he goes) and some of the house in general. The board was $150, and is in good shape, it has one notable ding on the nose, and a couple of minor scratches, but is generally fine, and the bindings are almost new Burton Customs, probably worth $250 new. (Burton is pretty much the top brand for snowboarding).

The pictures of the house aren't that great and don't really do it justice. The central chimney makes it nice and homely, which will be good come mid-winter when it's -25C outside, but doesn't make it easy to take pictures of anything. As you can see, our room is quite small, it's pretty much just the bed with a bit of floor around down one side and a chest of drawers at the bottom, but it's a lot more than some people will be having here this winter, and they'll probably be paying $1000 per month. There's plenty of space in here for us, and there's storage elsewhere in the house for our big stuff, cases, bikes, boards, and porch where all the wet gear will get kept come winter.

In general news, I'm feeling better now after my bout of manflu, still snuffly but much better. We're not really getting out and doing much at the moment, because the rainy season has finally hit, and it's getting chilly too. Not so great for our boss Ali, who's off on a cycle holiday for two weeks around Montreal with his girlfriend. We get to be in charge of the hostel for a couple of days until the big boss, Max, is back from his extended honeymoon... fun for us! We also sent in our applications to be Mountain Safety volunteers this winter, if we get it, we get a free lift pass, some uniform outerwear, and discount in the mountain shops... hopefully we'll get it, apparently they're usually pretty short so the signs are good.

It's just about time for me to go to work... sigh...

Jon (and Robyn)

Bleh

Jon and I are both a little poorly with colds so we won't be doing anything exciting in the next couple of days, I dont think.

Got a puncture on my bike already which Jon heroically fixed for me :)

2 of our housemates are gone now, leaving two left who are going within the next 10 days or so. Then we have to clean up the house for the new people, who hopefully will be cool.

Robyn x

Hiking in Whistler Interpretive Forest

We finally went on the hike that we were planning to go on last weekend but didn't because of the rain. Lots of pictures uploaded here - or use the little slideshow widget to go straight to the album. Here's the forest on google maps, we started by the highway and walked about a 5km loop into the forest as far as the suspension bridge and back, as you can probably tell from the photos.

We cycled down to the trail on our new bikes (pictures soon), both of which we've picked up second hand. One is silver and enormous with worn brake pads, but we picked it up for free - some guy who was staying here before we arrived just left it in the house... the other is red and probably a touch small for either of us, but in much better condition overall and cost $125 (around 65 pounds). Unfortunately, the red one picked up a puncture on the way home from the walk so now we have to fix that, but all things considered, we're very happy with the bikes.

Not really much more general news, we're still working away in the hostel and the diner, and should be getting paid for the first time this week, which will be nice... especially since the Turkey Sale (big Thanksgiving-time second hand sale of ski and snowboard gear) is coming up pretty fast.

Jon

Thar be snow!!!

Today when we went to work we noticed a layer of snow on the top of the mountain.... And there was a definite chill in the air too...

YAAAAAY!!

Not much planned for this week, some golf for Jon and a hike if it is sunny sometime.


Robyn xx

A little about Whistler and our lives

So I realised today that even though we're not doing a lot at the moment so we can't post a lot, I could write and tell you a bit more about where we're staying because its quite hard to explain why you come halfway round the world to live in tiny bedrooms and clean toilets!


Whistler is about a two hour drive from Vancouver. Its a very new town; it used to be a trail area for the Squamish and Lilooet (I think thats spelt wrong but oh well) First Nations tribes, and then a logging trail, etc. It only really started to be a town in the late 20s, and was then called Alta Lake. It was renamed Whistler in the 60s after the marmots that make a whistling noise in the mountains.

Its a pretty small town with a population of about 9,800, which swells to nearly 40,000 in the winter! This is because Whistler is one of the best places in the world to ski and snowboard, so loads of people around our age come here in the winter, especially Australian people who can easily get a 2 year visa. So people come here to work the winter season for the resort, because this gets you a free lift pass which is worth about $2,000. Its expensive to live here compared to the rest of British Columbia, so people will often work funny hours or two jobs to fit everything in and get their ski pass too. You know its a small town because it only has one gas station which we are right next to. (Just so you know, they have awesome slushies and the guy who owns it still works the counter - and hes a millionaire!)

The town itself is called Whistler and is mainly made up of Whistler Villiage (this is where most of the ski lifts, hotels, clubs etc are) and Whistler Creekside, which is where we are and is more local. There are two mountains which make up the ski resort, Whistler Mountain (which is the one you can see in our pics at the bottom of this post) and Blackcomb Mountain. Both of these make up a lot of ski trails! As well as skiing, Whistler is known worldwide for its mountain biking - there are really awesome trails and lots of bike races - there are always tons of people with full mountain biking gear on in town. Whistler also has, I'm ashamed to say, really beautiful golf courses which give it some of the best golf in the world and also some of the best fishing in the world too. So its a pretty awesome place!


Thats pretty much the basics. Everythings in Whistler; pool, cinema, ice rink, all the ski lifts, bike trails, hiking trials, rock climbing, golfing, skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, horse riding, rock climbing, bla bla bla....

Anyway, here are our pictures of the outside of our house and and idea of how far we have to walk to work and to walk to snowboard when it finally does snow! Its started to rain now, so it should only be about a month or so! And then we can start looking for snowboards etc... its expensive here but you can easily get cheap second hand gear if you want to.


Love Robyn (and Jon)

P.S... We will get round to phoning everyone soon! (Hi Brucie! x)

Edit: P.P.S. Enjoy the new little slideshow gadget we just added at the top right of the blog, we'll change the pictures to our latest set - you can click on it to go straight to the album.

Wal-Mart and work...

Being at work now means that we're really not doing a whole lot else, though we did go to Wal-Mart yesterday. Our boss Ali took us down to Squamish (a full 55 km away) where the nearest one is, and we bought a lamp and pillows and other boring stuff for our room, a 1kg box of exclusively oat cheerios, because they didn't have the 4 grain version in such a big box and Spore... along with a couple of other things. It wasn't the biggest Wal-Mart ever, but it still sold just about everything from street hockey goals to some strange kind of mint marmalade.

We're in our room in the house now, it's pretty small, but big enough for us. Unfortunately, it does have a sloping roof, which is easily low enough to hit your head on on the lower side. Also, the mountain biking guys that have been living here over the summer have pretty low standards of hygeine, so we've had to clean up the bathroom and kitchen already. Still, we pretty much get to be in charge of the winter guests so we'll make sure it doesn't get in a state again.

Robyn is at work dishwashing in the diner right now, and I'm stuck on the Tribal phase of Spore because micromanagement with a laptop touchpad mouse is rubbish. Still, I get to go do some work at the diner in about half an hour, which is more rubbish.

This has been a bit of a boring post, but we're probably going to go hiking tomorrow, because neither of us are working at the diner, so once we've cleaned the hostel around lunchtime we're free to do what we like. Hopefully we'll have some pictures and stuff to upload soon.

Jon

Not up to much at the moment...

Just a quick post, we've not been up to much really... stopped by the driving range of Whisler Golf course which was fun... I'm hoping to get at least one round of golf in before the snow hits. We're off out tonight with our room-mate Sebastien too, probably shoot some pool.

Moving into our (more) permanent room in the next couple of days, which will be nice... we'll finally be able to unpack.

Jon

Big Ol' Bike Ride

Today we used our connections and blagged bikes for the day - it normally costs about $90 a day to hire bikes around here because mountain biking is such a big thing, but the guy in the bike store owed our boss Ali a favour so we both got bikes for free all day! There are loads of trails from really easy to really hard, and because I'm still feeling very unfit we decided to take the valley trail out to the lakes we haven't been to yet. The trail map is here, and we went all the way round Lost Lake, Green Lake, the golf courses, stopping quite a lot to either look things like the sea planes or die of heat! It was really hot so we took a very quick dip in the very cold Alta Lake, which is probably my favourite lake. Anyway the pictures from today are here.


Nothing else to really report today; we're starting work in Southside Lodge tomorrow properly and we'll be starting in the diner on Sunday. We'll be moving into our new lodgings which is just behind the hostel on Monday. Our room's really small but the house itself is really nice - open plan downstairs with a big stone pillar running through it - quite mountain lodge-y really!

Robyn

P.S. - Yes, Toni, alright, it was just called Cows. We havent had ice cream there yet because we spent all our money in a sweet shop called the Great Glass Elevator, so I dont know if there is any wowie cowie. Love you too x

Exploring Whistler

So, today we spoke to Ali (the hostel host) about prosepective jobs cleaning the hostel and as dishwashers in the diner downstairs. Now, these aren't exactly glamourous jobs, but there are some pretty serious perks.

The cleaning comes with accommodation, which is like gold-dust up here, and requires us to put in about 3 hours a day between us, which we can do pretty much any time before check-in time at 4. It also offers some overtime cleaning houses that are also owned by the same company for a bit of extra cash.

The dishwashing job offers 50% discount on food at the diner, along with free meals on shift, is paid and requires work in the evening.

Combined, the jobs pretty much minimise our living expense, and offer a bit of cash too. We can then volunteer with Whistler Blackcomb to get our season pass for the mountain, which requires 23 days work, at around 1 day per week... Giving us maximal snow time while we're here. We're pretty stoked about the situation... it's also given us chance to go do some tourist exploring, rather than job and house hunting.

The picture above was taken walking around the lakes nearby the hostel (which is located here), and the rest of the pictures are here. There were a couple of arty-type sculpturey things along the trail we took, the chairs represented taking time to reflect, and later on there were some chimes, representing listening to the sounds of the valley. There were some pretty stunning vistas of the mountains too, the runs down Whistler and Blackcomb are grassy at the moment, it's hard to believe they'll be snowbound in a couple of months time.

Probably off to do more exploring tomorrow, and maybe take a swim in the lake... so long as the weather holds up, did we mention it's gorgeous here?

Jon

In Whistler!

So we've been in Whistler for about an hour and we`re already investigating jobs and have bought some ski boots - 2 pairs for $30! Bargain. The hostel here is run by a Bristish guy who`s lived in Dubai and Australia and our roommate is a French-Canadian - one of the first Canadian people we`ve met.

We`re finding out more about how our winter is going to work, but its common to work two jobs or work a job and volunteer to get your lift pass. But we`ll let you know how things are going on that front.

Generally otherwise, things are okay - its very hot here at the moment and we`re still adjusting to various things like having to work out tax and tipping, etc. But its all good :)

Robyn x

Laptop!!!

Two main activites today before going off up to Whister tomorrow: get bank accounts and buy a laptop... and we managed both with some time to spare to walk along the north bank of False Creek into Stanley Park.

Having a laptop now means that we've had time to upload more photos to the internet, and they can be found here - there are some from yesterday at Capilano, and some from today - check out the incredibly tame squrrel which came up and stood next to me long enough for Robyn to get out her camera and take a picture! There was also a guy who was balancing rocks, making columns like you can see at the top, it looks surreal, and without seeing him actually making one, it's hard to believe that they're free-standing.

So, we're off to Whistler tomorrow and we'll be looking for accomodation on Monday.

We'll be in touch again soon,

Jon (and Robyn)

Big Ol' Tour

Today we went on a tour which included some parts of Vancouver and the Capilano Park and Capilano Suspension Bridge which is in Northern Vancouver. Erik, the tour guide, was a Danish guy (no one here is Canadian!) who was well into his sixties and who has been doing it for free for about 14 years. The tour went through loads of trails in the park, which is all fir trees, some of which he maintains himself! He was pretty cool. We also saw a seal, yay.

Some stuff we learned:

- Vancouver is the 66th most expensive city in the world and has a population of about 2 million people. BC's population is about 4 million :|

-The Capilano Suspension Bridge (which is the biggest rope suspension bridge in the world) got hit with the force of 6 articulated lorries in 2006 when a massive tree fell on it. They didn't have to replace the bridge, but they did anyway for peace of mind. The anchors of the bridge were wrecked but the bridge itself was fine! Will put pics of this up later.

-Also in 2006, 20,000 trees were lost in a storm in Stanley Park :(

-There are only two buildings left in the city from when Vancouver was founded. They are both less than 200 years old! One is an old railway house where steam engines would come to be prepared and there is still one there that was built in the U.K. Opposite the steam house you can buy a square watermelon for $99 or a loaf of bread shipped in from France for $100.


No luck on the house front for Whistler yet :(

Here!

Hi all!


We're here and safe in the hostel in downtown Vancouver. The flight was pretty good (I wasn't even sick) but the transfer to the hotel via bus was a nightmare and the driver didnt have a clue so we went via cab. Then we were annoyed as stupid BUNAC didnt book us in the same room -or next to each other on the plane- but we had a good nights sleep anyway.

Off to our orentation soon, then we are here until Sunday. We think we have accomodation in Whistler, we'll let you all know. Going to go on an explore today.

Shower time!

Love Robyn (and Jon)

Leaving time!

Robyn wasn't fussed on posting, but I've decided to write something quickly. We're all packed up and ready to go, very excited now. We've got interviews for early season work at Whistler lined up for Monday 8th already, so we're spending the first few nights in Vancouver before heading up to Whistler on Sunday.

Excited, excited, excited....
Jon

Welcome to our Canada blog! Woo, we'll be posting all of our interesting news and pictures on here.