Victoria Day Weekend

This weekend is a public holiday in Canada - Victoria Day, which is the equivalent of the Australian Queen's Birthday weekend.  Local parlance calls it the "May 2-4 weekend", and there are a few traditions around this time of year that I've been told about.

The name "May 2-4" weekend is given partially because it falls on the 3rd Monday of May, which is usually on or close to May 24th.  The other part is because a "2-4" is Ontario slang for a slab/carton/24-pack of beer, and apparently that's what one should traditionally spend this weekend doing.  It's also the unofficial start of summer, and following on from that, the unofficial start of BBQing season, so it's time to turn on the BBQ and cook up some... I don't know what yet.  I'll let you know when we go to a Canadian BBQ.

Apparently this weekend is also the traditional weekend on which Canadians open their cottages.  From what I've been told, many people own cottages around the nearby lakes, a couple of hours drive away.  These are usually shut up in winter while it's snowing, but in summer, people like to go to their cottages for the weekend and drink beer and BBQ things.  I swear, Canadians are Australians' snowbound cousins - all of these holidays could directly transpose to Australia and no one would blink an eye.

In other news, the tulips are out in High Park:

There are a huge number of tulips around in Toronto and apparently there are even more up in Ottawa.  I had no idea, but apparently there is a significance to this:  during World War II, when the Germans invaded Holland, the Dutch Crown Princess Juliana and her two daughters (one of whom is the current queen) fled to Canada for safety from the Nazis, and lived in Ottawa for the duration of the war.  The Princess became pregnant while in Canada, and they had to declare some rooms in the hospital as belonging to the Netherlands so that the new princess could be born with solely Dutch citizenship.  Finally, at the end of the war, it was Canadian troops that liberated the Netherlands.  For all of these reasons, Holland apparently gifted a huge number of tulips to Canada, and continues to do so every year.

We've been spending our long weekend relaxing, walking in the park, studying and play board games with our Canadian friends.  There has been a distinct lack of 2-4s, but still, it's nice to have a break :)

Goodlife Toronto Marathon

Last weekend, Stephen ran his first marathon - the Goodlife Toronto Marathon.  For those of you who aren't aware, a marathon is a 42.2km run (26.2 miles).  He'd been training fairly well up until we visited Costa Rica, and then fell completely off the training bandwagon, so his longest training run in the lead-up was 26km.  I was pretty concerned for him.

The last few weeks have been pretty atrocious weather here - it rained nearly every day for 3 weeks.  The weather stations were reporting statistics like "until the clouds parted Wednesday afternoon and a merciful sun briefly shone on Torontonians, 4 days had gone by since we saw it last. To make matters worse, of those bleak 96 hours, it rained for 68."  So this was the weather Stephen was running in: 8 degrees and raining.  I don't have any pictures of him actually running, but here's one from the local newspaper to give you an idea of the conditions:

The course started a long way north of the city and ran down Yonge St (the main north-south street in the city), west out along the lakeshore past our house to a turnaround point, and then back along the lakeshore to finish in Queens Park, near the city.

I ran my 5km run earlier in the day as part of my recovery from my stress fractures, and I finished in 29:40 after aiming for a sub-30, with no bone pain or issues, which was good.  After my race finished, I hopped on the subway back home, showered and changed, and then Jax and I hopped back on the subway to get back to the finish line to see Stephen finished.  When we got there at around the 3 hour mark, I saw a guy who'd overdone it - he fell flat on his face 100m away from the finish line, and his legs were so wobbly that he couldn't get up again.  He seemed pretty delirious and he had to be supported to make it over the finish line - this made me more than a little worried about Stephen.  Luckily Stephen was ok, and I caught up with him 2km from the end, jogging along with a smile on his face.

Stephen reported to me after the race that he started getting a sore knee at around the 16km mark, so he dropped back his pace a bit.  It didn't get any better, but he finished the marathon with plenty left in the tank in a time of 3 hours, 37 minutes and 3 seconds - not bad for a first run.  There are some fairly cool statistics for his run available here, including the fact that over the final 12km he passed 44 runners but was passed by 14, and when the winner of the marathon finished, Stephen was at the 30km mark with 12km left to go.

Apparently the marathon organisers took a leaf out of the Vancouver Olympics' books, because this is the medal that he won for finishing.  It seriously weighs a couple of kilos.  It's fairly amusing considering that people were pretty exhausted at the end of the marathon - so they gave them giant heavy weights to carry during their recovery.

All in all, things went well, and he's looking forward to training for the Toronto Waterfront Marathon on October 16th.  His overall goal is to run the Boston Marathon, which has a cut-off time for entry - this year's was 3 hours 10 minutes, next year's is 3 hours 5 minutes.  There will be a lot of training involved to make it to that point I think, but he's pretty tough so I wouldn't rule it out.  Either way, running a marathon is something that nearly everyone could do if they trained, but very few people actually put in the time or the effort to make it happen - so kudos to Stephen for making the distance :)

Cherry Blossoms in High Park!

High Park is full of cherry blossom trees, and in May, they suddenly all bloom at once.  We were keeping an eye on them while we were going for our morning runs, and they were starting to bloom on Thursday, so we organised to go to the park with a friend on Saturday morning to check them out.  

It was really beautiful!   

But the entire place was packed with people - it's 15 degrees and that's the warmest it's been here for quite a while.  We took Jax with us, and he was a hit - people even wanted their photo taken with him.  I'm guessing it's because he's a Japanese breed that's not very common here, and the majority of the crowd was people of Asian descent.  I guess looking at cherry blossoms is a stereotypically Japanese pasttime too :)

People were even making origami cranes and hanging them from the trees :)

Blue sky!

The daffodils are starting to come out as well!  Spring in Toronto!

Costa Rica Part 4 - Arenal Volcano

Here's the last set of photos from Costa Rica - it's late and I'm pretty tired, so please excuse the commentary, but I wanted to make sure that I got them out before we leave for San Diego tomorrow.  Jet setters indeed.

We found one tour agent that was happy to speak to us despite it being the Easter long weekend.  Our hotel is where the A is, and the trip was to the Arenal volcano where the volcano is drawn on the map :)  It was a long drive - about 5 hours each way.

We stopped at Lake Arenal, which is a man-made lake/dam, and took a boat trip along the lake towards the volcano.  Here it is off in the distance.  Apparently the story is that it was called Arenal Hill and no one had any idea, until one day it exploded and took out three nearby towns and farmers in the process.  Pretty scary stuff.

Getting closer...

And finally we were there!  It was an amazing view, and apparently it isn't usually this clear.  Some of the cloud at the top of steam/smoke from the volcano, and some is just clouds.   The tour guide told us that this is pretty much a perfectly shaped conal volcano - it was amazing how symmetrical it was.

This is the view from our lunch spot.  This is around the other side of the volcano - apparently the crater has moved over time so you can just see the older crater to the left of the newer one.

Close-up.

After the delicious lunch we went to see some nearby hot springs, which was pretty amusing (although we're not really hot springs kind of people).  They did have three water slides, which were awesome.  

Our tour guide told us that the pools got progressively hotter as you went towards the top of the hill on which the springs were situated.  The second pool we stuck our toes in near the bottom of the hill was so hot that we freaked out - it was uncomfortably warm.  We thought that maybe we were just being wusses and tried to  stomach it - we managed to get in and stay there for a few minutes, but it was still pretty uncomfortable.  We tried some more pools on the way to the top, and it turns out that that was the second hottest pool there - I guess there's some variation in the temperatures.  Pretty funny - we're not so weak after all!

That's it from Costa Rica - tomorrow afternoon we leave for a whirlwind weekend in San Diego with Jess and Chris.  Photos to follow!

Costa Rica Part 3 - Scenery

Lots of beautiful natural scenery to gape at, here's a few pictures.  I'll put the volcano pictures up tomorrow.

Palm tree grove on the beach.

Blue sky, blue water.

Some of the arid Pacific coast climate, from out of the window of the bus.  It reminds me of rural Australia - low withered grass and stunted trees - but there are always those mountains in the background that remind you where you are.

Not quite a natural scene, but this was looking down one of the main roads in a small town.  It could be Cairns!

Some Costa Rican cows enjoying the view over Lake Arenal, which is a man-made dam lake that stretches nearly to the volcano.  Beautiful view.

Costa Rica Part 2 - The Animals

Costa Rica is renowned for its biodiversity - we didn't get to go hiking, but I was surprised by how much we saw from bus windows and around the hotel.  

Crab wars on the beach!

This looks like an iguana to me - huge!  There were heaps of these guys just hanging around the hotel.

This is a toucan - it was actually a fair way away, so it was hard to get a good photo.  Apparently there are six different types of toucans in Costa Rica, and this is one of the less brightly colored ones that inhabit the Caribbean side of the country (we saw it from our long bus trip to the volcano).

Monkeys!  White-faced capuchins to be exact - apparently there are only 4 types of monkeys in Costa Rica, and out of the four we saw these guys and a howler monkey.  We saw this group hanging around in a tree on the beach, watching the tourists go past.  We could literally walk under their tree, but when we did...

This guy seemed pretty angry at Stephen for getting so close to his tree, and ran towards us hissing and showing his teeth.  I was worried he was going to try to claw Stephen's face off.  The tour guide later told us that you shouldn't smile at these monkeys, because showing your teeth is a sign of aggression, so that's probably why he ran towards us showing us his!

It's a little hard to see, but these are some Caimans hanging around in the lake here.  They were only babies, but I still wasn't going much closer.

Finally, a macaw, in the restaurant we had lunch at.  Noisier than a cockatoo!  

Costa Rica Part 1 - Where We Stayed

We're back!  After a whirlwind 4 days in 35+ degrees and sunny Costa Rica, we touched down in Toronto at midnight, arriving to some lovely Canadian spring weather - 7 degrees and raining.

We booked the trip in February, with very little idea of Costa Rica as a country - we just picked it from a list, not even really realising how far south it was.  It was a long way.  We learned a lot about Costa Rica while we were there - it is a really beautiful place and the people are lovely.  We always felt safe, and even the roads seemed pretty tame.  The Costa Ricans ("Ticos") we spoke to were overwhelmingly proud of their country, telling us all about the demilitarisation of the country in 1948 and the benefits of their free education and health systems.

For those of you who are, like us, not very familiar with the geography of Central America, here's where we stayed relative to the rest of the continent.

And here's where we stayed in Costa Rica - on the North Pacific coast in the Guanacaste province.

I'll split the photos up into 4 blogs over the next couple of days.  This set of photos is about the area we stayed in.

We stayed in an all-inclusive resort, which in hindsight was a bit of a bad idea.  The idea was that we'd be able to go exploring during the day, and relax on the beach and around the pool in the evenings.  It didn't really work out like that - the resort was in the middle of nowhere, so we couldn't leave without an organised tour group, and it was full of fat tourists lounging around the pool and getting drunk on free alcohol.  We did try to hire a car, but they wanted to hold a thousand dollars on our credit cards, and our bank wasn't about to let a thousand dollar transaction go through from Costa Rica.  There's always next time.  This is the view from our window.

Here's the hotel from the top of a nearby hill - you can see how isolated it is.

We had some bad luck - because it was Easter weekend, there wasn't much going on, so we spent most of Friday and Saturday wandering around the hotel and its beach, but we did manage to get out to see the Arenal Volcano on the Sunday, before leaving on the Monday.

The beach was a black sand beach - I found it really odd.  I don't think my brain could come to terms with a beach that looked like mud.  The ocean was beautiful though, and so warm - we spent hours lazing around in the shallows.

Around the beach there were a lot of dense, scrubby little trees.  It reminded me of Australia, actually.  The north-west of Costa Rica is very very dry, whereas the central part has the mountains and the rainforest.

It had been so long since we last saw flowers.

Stephen was exploring the edge of the beach - Costa Rica had a lot of spiky plants, for some reason, and our attempt to climb the hill nearest to the hotel ended up with our legs torn up and itchy (we're ok now though).  This was also the first time we'd worn shorts since leaving Beijing in October.

Vacation time!

We're heading to Guanacaste, Costa Rica for a tropical vacation over Easter.  I don't think we quite realised how tropical though...

It's currently 1 degree and alternately raining and snowing here.  Uh oh....

Canadian Spring

People keep telling me that Spring is here, and that you can tell because the weather looks like this:

Rain, rain, rain, and some more rain to top it off.  I think I preferred the snow personally.

The temperatures are starting to go up at least, which is good - before, it would rain during the day which melted all of the snow, and then the temperature would drop below zero overnight and all of the rain and melted snow would freeze into huge ice sheets over everything.

A bit like this.  Yes, that's the path.

That was a couple of weeks ago... this week, it's looking more like this:

Most of the snow and ice is gone, only little bits left.  The grass somewhat amazingly hasn't died over winter, although it's looking fairly yellow in places.  We can actually utilise the full width of the path again, which is a nice change - in winter they only clear about 3/4 of a standard footpath width, so it gets a bit squashy when you're passing people and most of the time we end up walking in the calf-deep snow while some annoying women push a giant offroad baby stroller that's six times as big as it needs to be and say "like" a lot.  Hooray for spring!

The other night we invited some people over for a pie night.  It seemed like a fantastic idea at the time - everyone bring a pie to share, and we cook up and eat tasty pies and drink a few beers and chat.  After about the 4th pie, the issue became apparent - too many pies, too much sugar!  We managed to taste 6 pies, and the 7th is still sitting on my bench.  I can't look at another pie at the moment though :(

 The first two casualties - vegan apple pie and raspberry pie (which was my personal favourite of the evening).

An array of appropriate pie toppings - there's the standard vanilla ice cream, and then there's sorbet and soy ice cream for our vegan and lactose-intolerant friends, and then there's this weird thing called Cool Hwhi... I mean Cool Whip, which is apparently imitation cream - bizarre.

Finally, I had to include this picture.  I found this in the store the other day when I was looking for pinto beans, and I thought it had to be tried.  I told you Canadians put Maple Syrup on everything!

I can report that it is pretty gross - beans are not meant to be sugary sweet.

In other news, I start my new job tomorrow.  Apparently Toronto is having a bit of a shortage of UX professionals, so there was a lot out there.  I'm not sure how well I'll manage at getting up before 9am, but I guess I will have to relearn.  

R-r-r-roll up the rim

One of the best things about living in Canada is Tim Hortons.

Tim Hortons is basically a donut store chain, that also has hot drinks, sandwiches, bagels and soups, and it's a Canadian chain (Tim Horton was a hockey player).  Part of its awesomeness stems from the awesome hot chocolate and the tasty donuts.  The Canadian Maple donut is one of my favourites:

That's maple syrup on top, and it's filled with vanilla custard.  Delicious.

Another part of its awesomeness stems from its ubiquitousness - there are 3,040 stores in Canada and only 33M people, so there's one on nearly every corner. The final part of its awesomeness is the price - for a combo including a hot chocolate, some hot soup with a bread roll and butter and a donut (or muffin or tea biscuit or danish - anything you like in the store) it costs me $4.20. Considering that at Krispy Kreme or Donut King in Australia, a donut will set you back $2 and a hot chocolate will set you back $3, I am a big fan of their pricing.

Tim Hortons is having a competition at the moment - apparently it's an annual competition that they've been having for the past 25 years, and it's called "Roll up the Rim". The deal is, you buy a hot drink and you can roll up the paper rim on the side of the cup (which is actually really hard to do) to see if you've won anything (it's printed on the inside of the rim).  

Some Canadians have told me that the competition is run every year when it begins to get warmer again to keep people buying hot drinks - not a bad ploy.  

I thought it was a bit of a joke when I first heard about it, but I didn't count on the Canadian Tim Hortons-mania - not only have multiple different people told me about the competition and asked if I'd played yet, but stories of previous legal troubles resulting from the competition are being printed in the local newspaper.

Perhaps it's time to invest in some more hot chocolates.  And maybe a few Canadian Maple donuts while I'm there...