It’s been a long while since I have last updated my blog. The last few weeks I have been busy on holidays. It’s always great taking time off work, but sometimes you need a vacation to recover from your vacation.
My vacation started a few weeks ago when I headed up north for the week to Horseshoe Valley–a ski resort. A week filled with skiing, eating, snow, ice and cold. It must have snowed everyday, with temperatures well below freezing. Despite the cold weather and snow, it was a great week, with a few days of skiing with sunshine. There is still another month left that you can get some great skiing in, if it is something you enjoy.
When I returned from up North, it was time to hop on a place and head out west to Calgary to visit my younger brother. Calgary sure is a change of pace from Toronto. My first shock was getting off the plane to pick up my luggage, only to realize that anyone can come in and out of the baggage area off the street. In Toronto, you need to try to get past security first to get to that section.
The second shock was the size of Calgary compared to Toronto. My brother was away for work for a couple of days, so I decided to give myself a tour of Calgary, and walked around the city for a couple of hours….and saw almost everything. I was also surprised by how few people there were walking the streets, at 9am in the morning in the financial district.
Toronto has their fair share of road conditions and problems, but I found Calgary to have a terrible city street design. Several of their pedestrian cross walks don’t have flashing lights, just white lines that identify the walking area, and few signs informing drivers that this walk is coming up. This may be why we were always stuck behind a slow driver. In Calgary, they slow down so you can cross the streets, in Toronto, they speed up.
I found their transit system to be better than the Toronto system. Their C-Train is an above ground transit system that gets you to any part of their 4 quadrant grid that you are trying to get to. I also liked how the downtown strip was free of fare between certain stops. I also liked how you can get from one end of the city to another in much shorter time frame then in Toronto.
Despite the flaws, I found Calgary to be a very clean city. The weather there was great for this time of year, with sunshine every single day. I did find it odd that they put graval on their roads instead of using salt. Three out of four cars I was in while I was there had a cracked windshields from the graval bouncing up and hitting the windshield. Oh well.
There were no surprises at the Oscars this year, as the winners were pretty much expected to win based on other award shows this season. I was able to see some of the oscar nominated films in the last few weeks, with my favourite of the bunch being Juno. I’m disapointed that Ellen Page didn’t win, I think she played a great role, but not to the point of winning an oscar.
Now that I’m back from holidays, perhaps life can begin to slow down and get back on track, with more regularly posted blog entries about upcoming movies, music, and anything and everything.
