Quebec skiing and snowboarding

I grew up with the nearest place to ski being an hour away. It was definitely not a mountain, and probably more of a bump than a hill, so I'm finding it really exciting to be so close to Quebec where there are almost 90 stations spread out over two mountain ranges, the Laurentians and the Appalachians. I'm used to maybe making it out to a hill once a year, so I've been loving the opportunity to ski at multiple stations on an almost weekly basis!

I've been to Mont Tremblant (about two hours away) for one full weekend and quite a few Sundays, and there are many places to go during the week which offer great night-skiing. I have been to two different stations with other co-op students. We bring our gear to work in the morning and then one or two people drive to the hill after work. The first time we went was a few weeks ago to Camp Fortune, a hill that is only about 10 minutes from our workplace in Gatineau. Last night we headed to Edelweiss which was a nicer hill, about 15 minutes past Fortune.

I'm hoping that the snow keeps coming for as long as possible to get the most out of the winter season! I'm going to Mont Tremblant again on Sunday and the view there is just as amazing as the rush of heading down the slopes, so I'll be sure to finally post some pictures.

Happy leap year!

Weekly activities

I thought I'd share a few of the things I've been up to this week. With Winterlude ending this past weekend, we've been looking into some other Ottawa activities to keep us busy after work hours.

On Wednesday some co-op students headed to Absolute Comedy for a Pro-Am night. A couple of locals took the stage but what I couldn't wrap my head around (for any fellow childhood Discovery Kids watchers) was that the MC was the crazy "Mr. Gross" from Edible Incredible, a show I used to watch where kids race in some ridiculous cooking challenges. Turns out Mr. Gross is really Mike Paterson, one of Montreal's most popular comedians from Just for Laughs. The headliner was Nathan Macintosh who has won a Canadian Comedy Award and is now living in New York. I had never been to a comedy show before and it was definitely a lot of fun!

Now that the ice sliding is no longer available for lunch breaks, we took up another adventure in going to see an Imax movie. There is a theatre in the Museum of Civilization which is right down the street from the Environment Canada building. The show playing was "Flying Monsters" - it's been a while since I've seen a 3D Imax and I don't think they could ever not impress. It was about pterosaurs, the first reptiles with powered flight. Definitely another good way to spend a lunch break - I can't wait to check out the Space Station one next!

Thursday nights are also great because students can get free access to most museums and the Art Gallery. Tonight we went to the National Gallery of Canada which is a massive glass building. I'd like to check it out in the daylight when the sun is shining through!

By the time we got there after work it was about 6 and it closed at 8 so we walked around for 2 hours checking out the paintings, photographs and sculptures.

With the spider outside the Gallery

Winterlude!

Opening night for Winterlude, the National Capital Region's winter festival, was on Friday night (February 3). There are all sorts of winter activities to participate in both Ottawa and Gatineau. Most Winterlude events will take place over the next three weekends in February, although there are a lot of sights to see during the week as well. Jacques Cartier Park is an area right along the Ottawa river which happens to be just outside of my work building in Gatineau. It hosts the "Snowflake Kingdom", where big ice slides have been prepared. I've been able to see the massive efforts over the past couple weeks by the site organizers to make enough snow to build the slides - snow makers were working nonstop and I could see the gusts of snow shooting out as I walked to work every day.

On Friday I finally got to see the result of all this work - it opened at 10:30am and three other co-op students and I decided to take our lunch break early to go to the opening ceremonies. There was a little parade and some news broadcasts to announce the opening of Winterlude, and a ton of cute kids who came on trips from schools, clearly loving everything about the place. The ice slides were awesome, and we even waited in a long line of kids to go down the one with inner tubes.

The park is open Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays in addition to the weekends, so the co-op students and I have big plans to spend our lunch breaks ice sliding hehe.

My friend Celyne (from Guelph, on a co-op term in Deep River) came to visit for the weekend with a friend from her work who is on co-op from Dalhousie. We had a lot of fun checking out the first weekend of Winterlude, beginning with the musical fireworks that were set off by the Canadian Museum of Civilization on the Gatineau side. Plans to head to the museum were scratched when dinner ran late, but we ran through the streets (we weren't the only ones) to catch the fireworks from the Ottawa side. There were tons of people and it was definitely a spectacular show. 

Afterwards, we walked around parliament to show the Ottawa sights to Celyne's Nova Scotia friend, which was looking pretty good all lit up at night.

 We then headed to Rogers Crystal Garden where the 25th International Ice Competition was taking place. About 30 ice carvers from all over the world (France, Poland, Russia, Sweden...) had about 30 hours to make some really beautiful sculptures using saws and chisels. It was really cool to see although we only saw a portion of the process; I walked through the site today on my way home from a meeting in downtown Ottawa and finally saw the finished sculptures. They were amazing!! Hopefully I'll go back and take some pictures before any more melting happens - it's been pretty warm the past couple days, only about -5 and I noticed a head and one or two legs had fallen off of the sculptures. 

This is already a long post so I'll cut it here and write some more later, but the rest of the weekend was great! Saturday was a gorgeous, warm and sunny day; we grabbed some yummy Beavertails and skated 10k down the canal, then headed to a concert in Quebec for the night. Sunday when Celyne left, I had yet another great trip to Tremblant. It's turning out to be a weekly thing...so awesome!