A week in Canada

This week in Whitehorse we've done a few hours volunteer work with the Salvation Army, collecting money at Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire with our Uncle Ted who does this every year for Christmas. On Tuesday night we saw the movie, Australia, and although we slunk in our seats and tried to mask our Australian accents, the Canadian audience seemed to really enjoy it.

On Wednesday we spent the day at the Canada Games Centre, built in Whitehorse for the Winter Games. Here we ice-skated, which was lots of fun, but clearly not as much of a novelty for the locals as we had the rink to ourselves. We could also swim, use the slippery dip, the 'lazy river', spa, sauna and gym. So we made a day of it and it was nice to stay away from the lingering minus 28 degrees outside.

The Lazy River

That night we saw a puppet show called 'Richard 3.5'. It was a great show, loosely based on Shakespeare's Richard III. On that note, I should mention that after Stuart did the puppetry workshop with Eric Bass last Saturday he was asked to be in a play called 'The Longest Night'. The play is on this weekend, celebrating the shortest day on 21st December and Stuart is puppetering a sheep which he is in the process of making. He has been/will be in rehearsals every night until Saturday. Last night the temperature dropped to minus 35 and it may reach 40 in the next week or so.

This is Fish Lake, which is obviously frozen over at this time of year, so we ventured out onto the ice with Wally, Ted's dog.

Today we've been skiing for the first time. Pauline and Ted have cross country and down hill skis as well as snow shoes, so we threw on some skis and made the challenging trek to the back of the house and practiced coming down and falling into the snow several times. It is so much fun though and we are gradually increasing time spent vertically and decreasing time ploughed headfirst into snow. Tonight Stuart has rehearsals and the rest of us are going to watch a game of curling which we don't know much about.