November 26th

 Winter in Vancouver - it's fantastic!!!

Snow, snow, snow and snow - Can't believe it - all that rain now converted to snow. It's simply amazing!!!

Yesterday morning at 8 o'clock the alarm clock rang. We jumped out of bed (at least Eva-Marie did), Rasmus liked the nice warm "dyne". Anyways at 9 AM we were on our way to Grouse Mountain. We walked to the seabus (it takes 5 min), then we took the seabus to North Vancouver (15 min).

 Bus 236 left just as we arrived to North Vancouver and it took 20 min to go to the gondola. The bad thing about Grouse is that everybody has to get on a gondola to go to the skiing area and it holds only 60 people at the time. So we waited a bit in line to get up there - but it was definitely worth it. We arrived at the top at 11 AM or so and it was beautiful. 150 cm snow base, it was approximately -2 °C and it was snowing (that's why the pictures look grey).

The renting of ski/snowboard went fast and soon we were ready to hit the slopes J

The size of the area is about the same size as the ones in Norway. There weren’t too many people on the slopes even though it was the first day that everything was open! But it was a bit different than in Norway because 90 % were snowboarders – but there were room for everybody on the slopes!

The picture below is of one of the slopes we accidentally went on - it was called the peak but we didn't think much of this, but we would soon discover that it was named after the humps (pukler)! 

Grouse Mountain also has the benefit of the most beautiful view in the world – from the slopes you can see the whole city of Vancouver, including downtown, Kitsilano and UBC. Unfortunately it was snowing so the view wasn’t all clear but we could see some of it – we’ll go again a day when the weather is clear, that’s for sure!!

After a couple of hours we went in to a café and had some hot chocolate. It was very nice to be able to feel you toes again.

No actually it was not that cold. Sometimes when the wind and snow was in you face it was but otherwise it was a very nice temperature.  

After 6 full hours on the slope we were ready to head home to a long warm shower, but it shouldn’t be like that. The gondola didn’t work and after 40 freezing minutes in line we decided to go to the restaurant and have some food and defrost. This was the wisest thing we did all day. After dinner the gondola worked again and we could go down to the bus and head home. Unfortunately the bus that arrived after 20 min couldn’t take all the passengers and the next one didn’t leave until an hour later… Damn! We took another bus and walked the 15 blocks to the seabus, this wasn’t bad as we were warm and it was in the beautiful snow. Finally we got to the saebus and at 10.30 PM we were home. All in all a great day - despite the waits it was defiantly worth it. We’ll go again next weekend J

To all those hockey fans out there: Last weekend we went to a Hockey Hall of Fame game.

Greg gave us free tickets (it was an event to help spinal cord research) and it was an amazing experience. All those hockey stars in one game.

Unfortunately we’re not Canadians so we only new a few – but the clever hockey guys at floorball told us that we’ve seen ALL (almost – not Wayne Gretzky) the greatest. Even though we didn’t knew ‘em we could defiantly see that they were amazing players J On the picture below Haley - the captain of the Canadian women's national team is trying to start a wave!