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!