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Notes on a Cold Climate - Layers

Need to go outside? Are you wearing enough layers of clothing?

Pad yourself down. If you can tell you're own gender, you need more layers.

Top Five: Things you won't see in an Australian Garage

In the quest to find the fundamental differences between Australian and Canadian culture, our first stop goes no further than the garage. Here are the top five things you are unlikely to see in an Australian Garage....

At number 5: you might find shovels in an Australian garage but "snow shovels" would be very unlikely.

Number four: you might find pool salt in Oz but "ice salt" is way less common.

Number three: A Canadian flag wedged under a set of "snow tires" is possible but highly unlikely.


Number two: BB guns. If the police saw you with these down under, they would shoot you on sight.

And at number One, the most unlikely thing to see in and Australian garage is... Critter Ridder: Repels dogs, cats, racoons, skunks and groundhogs

The Australian version might read: Repels dogs, cats, possums, cane toads and dugites

Ice Skating

Rideau Canal
Photos from Flickr's Creative Commons
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ciaochow/2253712350/

I have never been a great fan of rolling or gliding across hard surfaces. Roller-blading and skateboarding are not sports indented for lanky people with bad knees. At least with surfing, you’re pretty much guaranteed to land on something soft.

Ottawa however has a “Canal Culture”. It’s the thing to do in the winter: skate down the Rideau Canal, eat Beavertails (registered trademark) and sip hot chocolate. When in Rome, I’m all about togas, so I gave it a go.

Beavertails on the Canal

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dugspr/2258634208/

We hired skates from a bike shop near the Pretoria Bridge and gingerly climbed down the steps to the ice. I have enough trouble walking on an icy “side walk”, so I felt vaguely uneasy about putting blades under my feet to make me slide more.

I strapped them on and moved my feet on the ice beneath the bench and thought, “This is a pretty unlikely form of transport.”

Unfortunately, my instructor hadn’t skated for over seven years and had little advice on the theory of how it was done, “I don’t know, you kind of move your feet in an “s”, like you’re doing the twist.”

As with anything that you learnt to do from a young age, it’s hard to explain. Could you tell someone how to ride a bike?

I moved forward about three metres and made a controlled fall. I lay on the ice and looked up at the sky, “This is a lot more agreeable. You go ahead, remember how it’s done, then come back and tell me.”

I sat and watched. There were scores of people: couples elegantly gliding up and down the ice hand in hand, teenagers with hockey sticks and grannies reliving their youth. Kids were being dragged behind parents on sleds or learning to skate with plastic stands – a sort of Zimmer frame for skating. Others wore helmets. One I saw had a full goalie’s mask. Dental care isn’t covered by the national health. That’s the time to learn to skate - while your bones are still malleable. Thirty-year-old Australians I decided, had no business learning to skate.

First skate of the Year

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alex_ferguson/3156701609/

I was very disturbed by the number of skating paramedics around. One of them pushed a sort of stretcher sled. Were there that many spinal injuries out here? This didn’t make me feel any safer.

Eventually Jay came along. He had taught people to skate before. It was too late though, my confidence had been shot, “Put one skate behind the other like a T and push”

“yaaarrar”

“Ok, if you don’t want to take your skates off the ice, try moving your skates in a C-shape,”

That was a bit more manageable, and with aides holding either arm, I made it shakily across to the other bank of the canal, “Where are we heading?”

“Just past that corner and then another 200m”

I looked back at the fifty metres I had just travelled, “You must be kidding! In the words of a great man ‘Fook that!’ I’ll see you at the pub, thanks anyway though.” They skated off with the ease and confidence that I knew would never come to me.

That’s fine with me. I’ll be happy to watch from the side-lines, sip the hot chocolate and warm up it with a dash of whiskey. My ice hockey career - over before it began.

Horizontal Skating

New Country New Car

Check out our 1998 Chevrolet Malibu. Pretty sweet deal... apart from a faulty alternator.

Now we can drive the Chevie to the levie, regardless of how dry it is. I'm sure someone will be drinking some rye!

Greetings from British North America...

...or “Canada” as they like to call it these days,

We arrived in the nation’s capital - Ottawa for the undereducated - which is very much like Canberra in a way. Half way between the two major capitals (Montreal and Toronto instead of Sydney and Melbourne) and filled with government employees.

Since my arrival I have:

• Bought a car
• Slipped on ice
• Eaten a “funnel cake”
• Shovelled the driveway
• Driven a snowmobile
• Sampled local produce
• Been to a hockey game
• Drank with locals (and yokels)
• Experienced a white Christmas
• Watched Team Canada win the juniors
• Discovered the wonders of vodka martinis

Why am I here?
Well, my good partner happens to be Canadian and I wanted to see what all the fuzz was about. She was good enough to follow me to the most isolated capital city in the world, which I once called home, so I thought I might follow her to the third coldest capital city in the world, where her family is from. Strangely ironic since I don’t really like being isolated and she doesn’t like being cold.

Also, after living in foreign parts for such a long time, we thought it might be interesting to live somewhere you can chat to your cab driver. The irony is, we can’t afford to take cabs here and I’m told most cab drivers here have a pretty low level of English.

I’m always interested in visiting new parts of this small blue-green orb. You really don’t know nothing about nowhere until you been; and so there are a few questions I’ll seek to answer:

What’s with the orgy of flag waving nationalism? Is it really compulsory to stitch those little flags to your pack when travelling? Or is it a service offered at airports to prevent being killed as suspected Americans?

Why do they seem unconcerned about having a queen as their head of state while Australians jump up and down and have referendums?

How has their world-dominating southern neighbours affected the national psyche?

What really is the difference between Canadian, American or Australian culture? Is that a contradiction in terms? Or is it a bit like the difference between baseball and cricket?

How does this completely public healthcare system work?

Why is there a section of France (three times larger than the original) in the middle of the country?


Why is it on the American Odyssey web-blog?
To tell you the truth, I can’t be bothered starting a new one; so this will be a blog for the continent.

One last thing...

If the number of Americans who owned flags, voted; it would be a very different country!