Niagara Falls

On Sunday it was a beautiful day and so we decided to visit Niagara Falls. We took the bus to the village Niagara on the Falls, went out of the bus and looked for the falls, but there was nothing! See the last picture in our photo album for the nice view ;-) We had to take another bus, which took us the falls.

They were really spectacular, but to be honest we both thought that they were bigger. We took a lot of pictures from both parts, the American and the Canadian.

It was a sunny day and so we saw a beautiful rainbow over the falls. We also decided to visit the journey behind the falls, where we went down to a lower level (by the way, that’s where Superman rescued Louise). We saw the Canadian falls from close up and experienced the mist, but we first got very stylish yellow raincoats, so we were safe and stayed pretty dry. There was also a small trail and from there you could really see the waterfalls from the back, but actually we just saw a white wall out of water.

After visiting the nature spectacle we went to the entertainment district of Niagara on the Falls, which is 5 min on foot away from the falls and a real tourist city. Please add some comments, we’re always glad to read them!

Weekend Trips – Safari and NHL

This weekend we rented a car (Toyota by the way) and travelled to the African Lion Safari Park. There we went on a Safari, meaning that we could see all the animals in wildlife from our car. We always opened the window to take pictures, but a friendly park ranger told us to close it. After several times (we never listened to her) she started to shout at us, “Close your window!” But during the safari, we heard this sentence quite a lot and every time it was determined for us. There were lots of animal to observe, but what I liked most were the monkeys. They were so cute, especially the little ones. They also jumped on the car and took a short ride, knowing exactly when to get off again.

In the afternoon we travelled on to Buffalo, to watch an ice hockey game of the Buffalo Sabres. By the way, that’s the NHL team where the Austrian Thomas Vanek plays. We thought that we would need maximum 3 hours, including crossing the border and searching for a parking lot. But everything was different from what we expected. When we crossed the border there were not a lot of cars, so we thought that we are lucky. But then they took all our passports, because our friends didn’t have a visa. We went into the office together, there were several people waiting. After talking to them we started to say good-bye to the hockey game- most of them were already waiting for 3 hours! In fact, we had to wait so long that the game had already started and so we missed the initial 30 minutes. However, the game was really amazing and we are now dedicated Sabres fans - Andi bought a t-shirt and I am the proud owner of a Sabres finger/hand. As always, please visit the photo album.

Algonquin Park - Canoe Trip

This weekend we decided to join the McMaster Outdoor Club on his Canoeing Trip to the Algonquin Park, which is in the North of Ontario. We started on Friday afternoon and experienced the luxurious quality of the yellow school busses for 4 hours (our legs still hurt), until we finally arrived at the first campground. After brushing our teeth in the middle of the forest, we went to bed in our beloved tent.

The next day we travelled to the Portage Store at the famous Canoe Lake and after a short introduction to canoeing we started paddling around the various lakes. We really enjoyed it, but sometimes it was quite tough. We also had to do a portage, which means that we had to lift our canoe off the water and carry it on our back to the other lake, including the other equipment like tent and sleeping bags. Andi was the first who tried it, me carrying the backpacks.

In the afternoon we arrived at our wild camp place, not even self-registration - can you imagine? We decided to build up our tent on a small hill, where we had a spectacular view over the lake. You can see it on the picture beside. In the evening we cooked some pasta over the fireplace and later that night we came into contact with roasted marshmallows on the fire and warm apples for the first time. We also experienced the delicious taste of marshmallow sandwiches (marshmallow + chocolate + cookie), which is typical for America!

After sitting a long time beside the fire, we went to bed, but not so our other group members. They stayed awake for a long time and so the next morning they didn’t wake up until 11am. We are late-riser, but this was even too long for us, but we enjoyed the morning and discovered the area around our camp place. In the morning we brushed our teeth while sitting on the rocks and looking over the lake.

The only bad thing was that at the time the other group members woke up, it was too late to carry on with the original route - so we had to take the route, which we did the day before. Back at the portage it was my time to carry the canoe, but to my astonishment it was not as heavy as I expected it. We also went swimming in the lake and rock jumping which was very cold, but the weather was very warm and sunny. You can see more pictures in our Algonquinpark photoalbum.

It was a very amazing journey, because Algonquin Park is a very unique landscape, especially when there is Indian summer.

Toronto

On this day, I met my host-family. We decided to take an earlier bus to travel to Toronto to have a short look around in the city. But you know us, things always turned out differently from what we expect. At first there were no busses going from Andi’s house to Hamilton downtown. According to Andi’s roommate it wasn’t a long walk to the GoBus station, so we decided to go. But after half an hour we were still walking and finally after one hour we found the bus station. Then the bus was too crowded and so we took the other bus, which should only take 15 minutes more than the other one, the bus driver told us. To conclude, we were in Toronto exactly at that time, when I told the Homestay department of the ILSC to pick me up.

They drove us to my new home, where I’m staying for the next 3 months. My homestay family is very nice and I have my own room and even my own bathroom on the third floor. You can see my windows at the picture beside (the three windows on the top). My first evening ended like a typically American dinner, a pizza ordered from a restaurant while watching TV. My hostfamily also has two boys, at the age of 6 and 7, which are very cute. One day they taught me how to play American football and I now know what’s a spin shot and how to catch the ball the right way :-)

I go to school everyday from 9 am to 4 pm and I like it. Sometimes I feel like I am back to school in Austria. I found many friends from all over the world, Switzerland, Brasil, Mexico, Venezuela, Korea, Japan, etc. After school we often spend our time together, discovering Toronto, searching for Outlet Malls, which we by the way never found.

One bad thing is that it takes me 45 minutes or longer to get to school every day. That’s what I am missing of Austria and especially of Graz, standing up only half an hour before the course starts and riding the bike to University for only 5 to 10 minutes. But compared to others I’m glad to live very near to the school, others need over one hour each day- yes Toronto is a big city. See some pictures in my photo album.

Toronto itself is a very multicultural city, there are lots of people from different parts of the world and it is hard to find real Canadians. But everybody is very friendly and helpful.
I’m really enjoying my time here in Canada, everyday is full with new experiences and I learn a lot, not only English but also things that are important for my future life.

Start and End

Wednesday was sad and interesting as well. Sad because our journey ended at Edmonton airport. Interesting because a new life in Hamilton at McMaster University and in Toronto at the ILSC was going to start. We didn’t have any problems giving back our car - no wonder, we even repaired it ;-) – and went on to check in for our very cheap Westjet flight. On the one hand we didn’t pay any fees for our bags, which were all marked as "too heavy". On the other hand we also got the information that we are free to bring our own food on board, because there was no food provided. But this was no problem for us, we are already extreme campers and brought a lunch bag with us.

Three hours later the stewardess said: “Welcome to Steel City, Hamilton!” Our first impression was that of a chaotic city, no bus at the airport, a taxi driver who nearly crashed because of typing our address into the GPS and Julia screaming because she already saw us crashing into a tree. However, when we arrived at 21 Glenmount Avenue, Andis roommates were very nice and helped us to carry our luggage.

Later that evening, Andi met the landlord and the room and all facilities turned out to be very nice. Although Andi is living together with six other people, it’s not a problem to share two bedrooms and one living room. Still not tired, we decided to join one of Andi’s roommates, Ernest, going to the McMaster Comedy and Outdoor Night and getting a first impression of the campus. See some pictures of the campus and Andi's room in the Hamilton Photo Album.

World's Biggest Shopping Mall

Nearly at the end of our journey, we decided to have a look at the city of Edmonton, which is the capital of Alberta and one of the fastest growing cities of America (of course because of oil). Although it was pretty nice, there were no special sights.

So we traveled on to the most famous attraction the West Edmonton Mall. This is the largest shopping center in the world, containing a Rollercoaster and a big Waterpark. Of course we had lunch there and looked at the shops, but the purpose of our visit was to check out the great slides at the Waterpark. However, when we wanted to enter, the sign said that nearly all slides are closed and that was pretty annoying. We also met two Swiss people who decided not to enter the park, but as this was the main attraction we decided to go into it and we were really lucky: after 4 o’clock nearly all slides opened up and there was almost nobody standing in line. We even dared to ride the steepest slide (the red one), which you can see in our Edmonton Photo Album.

Of course this experience left its mark on our skin (Andi’s eye and my back). Starving, we had to go to the foot court after the Waterpark again - we've already adopted the American way of life :-)

In the morning we had found a cheap Motel near the airport, where we traveled then. We wouldn’t have guessed what we saw there: the Motel turned out to be a cowboy saloon with some rooms upstairs. Still we felt very safe, because there were three security doors, four cameras and we weren’t even able to open our own door. But finally we found out the code to open our door: just stick in the key only one third, turn it one quarter, stick it in completely and turn it one time around – isn’t that easy?

After that we started to carry our bags up to our rooms. This was actually a lot of work, because we had everything lying around in our car. The reason for taking a motel room was packing our stuff and not making our tent wet again. After clearing out our car, we hardly find a place in our room. It took us some hours in the night, packing a whole room of stuff into only four (!) suitcases - wow, what a compression factor!

The eternal ice

After a rainy Sunday afternoon, we didn’t expect a lot of Jasper Nationalpark. However, the weather turned sunny again and we were able to value the impressive nature again. We started the day with a hike to the Athabasca Glacier, where we walked on the secured part of the ice and laughed at the people who were freezing. As we are Austrians, we prepared for that event wearing ten layers :-)

We again met two Germans who were traveling with an RV. After telling them our story of the bear in Yellowstone Park, the man became very envious, because his girlfriend was not courageous enough to sleep in a tent.

We carried on visiting more sites along the Icefields Parkway such as Bubbling Springs, Athabasca Falls, Maligne Canyon etc. We also traveled on the old Highway A93, which has been suggested by the travel guide - but we can’t suggest it. The street was covered with tears and road holes. Of course, we were looking for bears all the time, but we weren’t able to see any :-(

We finally left Jasper Nationalpark (again, see our photo album) in the afternoon and traveled on to our last destination, which was Edmonton. We also experienced Navigation Optimization when our Nüvi led us trough a housing estates in order to avoid a U-turn. Please notice our shortcut besides :-) Finally we found the campground we were searching for and got a nice place for our tent. There we also met an Oilfield Engineer from Calgary who was really nice and told me lots of important details about the ILSC home stay program. Being more North than ever before in our lives we fell asleep under the stars.

The day of the beautiful lakes

After one night in the lonely forest of Banff, we packed our suitcases again and started traveling to Lake Louise. I nearly got lost with my suitcase, but finally Andi decided to take me with him. Lake Louise turned out to be very nice, having a beautiful water color and a nice castle, the Fairmont Chateau. To escape the huge mass of tourists we decided to rent a canoe and paddle to the other side of the Lake. As the boathouse belongs to the Fairmont Chateau, we had to pay 50 bucks for our fun. Please visit our Banff Photo Album to see more of this beautiful place.

However, after that we felt like real guests of the hotel, so we also took a look inside. Not just impressing from the outside, it turned out to be elegant inside as well.

Around lunch time, we traveled to the Icefields Parkway, which is the only road from Banff to Jasper. Passing by some more impressive lakes, we decided to stay a little at Bow Lake and have lunch near the water. When we were just sitting there in the silence, a bus of Chinese guys entered the area. Suddenly the place was crowded and everyone was taking pictures. See the picture beside and please note the Chinese woman/girl posing as a swan, which is very typical for them. As you can guess, we left immediately, heading forward to the famous Peyto Lake. It’s got a wonderful color that changes with the season and is influenced by minerals and bacteria.

The road took us on to Sunwapta Crossing and the glacier region, when the weather suddenly turned bad. However, being tough, we decided to hike to Panther Falls using a very narrow trail. As this is a bear area, we started to sing and whistle to attract attention and had so much fun, that we didn’t realized at first, that we were already standing in front of the falls.

The next stop was the famous Athabasca Glacier, which just looked ugly in the rain and so we moved on to the Campground. Funny enough, this Mountain Campground had a self-registration and we had to throw the money into a box. That also means that we had to look for a free spot driving off-road with our car. But we found a nice guy (I called him Jumanji) travelling on his bike, non-smelling dump toilets and even German speaking people.

Our day ended with a very romantic self-prepared dinner with a spotlight in the car. We love bears :-) !

Approaching the mountains

We started the day with a short trip to Calgary downtown. Finding a parking lot isn’t as easy as we thought, but we finally made it. However, the parking lots are strange as well here: there was a railway going through it! Calgary’s downtown doesn’t have a lot of sights, so we just took a quick tour through it and visited the Devonian Gardens. That’s a park on the fourth floor of a shopping mall, hosting turtles, huge fish and even weddings. See our pictures in the Calgary photo album.

Another nice place to go is the Stampede, kind of a city where a big cowboy show takes place every year in July. Next to it we saw the Saddle Dome, home of the Calgary Flames hockey team. The sports show went on as we visited the Olympic Park with ski-jumping facilities, ski slopes and an ice channel. However, Calgary was not the most interesting place to be and so we went on to Banff Nationalpark.

Our plan was to have a quick look at the town of Banff and then camp near Lake Louise. But when we entered Banff it was love on the first sight. We parked near a river where people where hiking and canoeing. You can see this romantic spot in our Banff photo album. After entering downtown, we decided to stay in Banff overnight because of the nice wooden shops, houses and bars with the mountains in the background. We built up our tent in a campground near the town by daylight (we’ve got the last few places again) – however, the spot was in the middle of nowhere again, surrounded just by trees and wildlife.

Later that day, we went to a typical steak restaurant (Sirloin steak with fries and vegetables) and spent the night in the city. As you can see in our pictures, I found a job as souvenir doll. ;-) Finally, we used the visitor’s center WiFi to write a new entry for this blog!