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)