Canadian Chocolate..fit for your dog

Post #6

The family and I have been living in Canada for over 2 years now and we see no reason to return to the UK for anything other than vacation. We have met lots of great friends, I've continued my association with Honeywell and enjoy my role here more every day and we've been introduced to a few new experiences.

Skiing: we were on the ski slopes on Vancouver Island within days of arriving under the expert tutelage of my cousin Kirsty and her family. We've progressed from cautious snow-plough to cautious parallel turns (technical term) to tempting the Olympic downhill course at Whistler. Actually that was Josh and I one weekend when we up with friends. Josh and the friends skied straight down the hill, or cliff as I liked to call it, and I opted to ski across the hill and therefore made far more turns and consequently took about half an hour longer. I don't think I will make the team for these Olympics. For those of you unfamiliar with skiing, we have 3 grades of hill: Green, which is the easiest regardless of which hill you are on; Blue, which can range from moderately difficult to the aforementioned cliff; and Black, which is almost always cliff-like, frequently bumpy and often narrow. These grades differ depending on the hill you are on. For example, the black slope on our local mountain, Mount Seymour, is like the blues at Whistler and our blues are like the greens at Whistler. we have also learned that snow boarders are the skiing equivalent of the dark side, sneaking up behind you before turning sharply. This has two results: the snow boarder narrowly misses you and secondly, they make a very loud, very sudden noise, right behind you regularly necessitating a fresh pair of undergarments. If you want to see some photos go to http://www.mountseymour.com/ or http://www.whistlerblackcomb.com/



Football (or soccer if you live here): this sport, our religion back home is open to everyone; men, women, boys, little girls, of all levels of ability. From expert toe punters like me (I'm expert at hitting the ball squarely with my toe and nothing else in fitba) to little girls who have never kicked a ball before, like Evie when we first arrived. This is different to Scotland where fitba was really on open to boys who were pretty good (assuming you knew someone who coached a team) and amateur men who played on a week day night and took the sport far too seriously. So both Josh and Evie have been playing in a team since they arrived and I help coach Josh's team with a great Kiwi called Grant. We don't have to pass any coaching exams or courses run by the local authority, but nor do we have to submit forms so that the club can check our Police records. This is a little scary but it seems to work fine.

Baseball/Field Hockey: in the late Spring/early Summer Josh plays in a baseball team and Evie a field hockey team. We have to call it field hockey here because "hockey" is the game they treat as their religion here that they play on ice and if you are new to the sport you spend the entire game watching where the puck (think of the ball, but smaller, harder and kind of flat...so not really a ball) used to be 3 seconds ago. It's slightly easier when we watch my cousin Heather's boys playing, but not much. So baseball is the most boring game in the world, it typically lasts 2.5 hours and consists of small boys missing the ball a lot. Field Hockey is considerably more fun, being as it is considerably shorter in length and, with the success rate of Evie's team, including more scoring.

Spring time: in the Spring in Vancouver we are able to partake in the North American experience of skiing in the morning and lying on the beach in the afternoon. This is not something we were capable of doing in Glasgow. The closest we got to this was skiing on artificial ski-slopes which was brush matting. Imagine skiing over a large brush turned upside down. Now imagine how much skin you would have left if you fell on it.

Otherstuff: we have kayaking available, hiking, mountain biking and, of course, the wildlife. We regularly see bald eagles, bears, raccoons and pigeons(??) and in the ocean we have seals, sea lions, dolphins, Grey whales and orca.

However, it's not all rosy in the land of maple syrup. Their chocolate is just the wrong side of inedible. I'm not talking about some weird Canadian brand that we've never heard of, I'm talking about Cadbury's. It's something to do with the stuff they put into the chocolate to prevent it from melting, but the result is a chocolate that we would typically give to dogs in the UK. Canadian TV is awful, unless you have the really expensive cable, in which case it's lots of channels of awful content and a few decent shows and sports. We watch the BBC channel which is exclusively news programs, the Food Channel if our Jamie Oliver is on it and erm, that's about it. Of course it is perhaps deliberately bad to discourage us from sitting in front of it all evening and get out to enjoy all of the above activities, but even then, there's no excuse for dross we have to put up with. Those of you reading this from the UK should be grateful that you have the BBC's many channels (TV and Radio) and Channel 4. Equally frustrating are the Canadian takeaway curries. Horrible runny and, in some cases, quite healthy. If I wanted "healthy" I wouldn't be choosing a curry. They don't have pubs here but they do have sports bars. This means you sit at a table, have beer and other tipples brought to you by a waitress (almost exclusively very pretty, blond and wearing a dress at least one size too small). Then you sit with your friends and try not to be distracted by the myriad of televisions (monster screens) showing everything from hockey (the ice version) baseball, American Football, golf, and the most pointless of sports, basketball. A game in which a point is scored every 3 seconds by unnaturally tall boys whose shorts would make rather baggy trousers for the averagely heighted person. Every 3 seconds...which means there's absolutely no action or interest at all until the last 5 minutes. And people watch this, in bars. And the unnaturally large TVs, all competing for viewers in these bars, all have the sound up.

Other than this we are happy here.