Ski Jumping

No, no, I did not pick up another winter sport but they had the Canadian National Ski Jumping Championships on in Callaghan today. So after my ski – 2.5hrs on skates all the way to Madeley Lake and back along Around the World and Brandywine – I stopped at the bottom of the jumps to watch. I have never seen this live and it was really cool – and scary! The first few jumpers got down to the 70+m mark. Looked pretty good to me but there was more to come. This was the third jump on the tall jump and they had seeded the competitors from shortest to furthest jump. So the good guys were at the end. And I was surprised when I heard that 3 jumpers from Germany were also in the mix – forth to second last jumper. Those guys jumped into the 130+m mark. I thought that was tough to beat but then came the last jumper from Canada. And that guy, Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes - 20 yrs of age, flew down all the way into the flat safety zone -142m. Whoa!!

Before leaving I got a picture with the German jumpers – asking them in broken German but they were willing enough. Martin Schmitt was part of the German team that won the Silver Medal here in Callaghan on the HS140 during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. This picture is for my friend K3 in Germany!! She is a big fan of anything to do with ski racing – on TV that is. Nevermind she would blow me away in running, biking or swim

Last but not least exciting, we saw a Lynx or Bobcat crossing the road into the Olympic park today. He trotted across as if there were no road – with 3 cars barreling down on him. unfortunately we were car 3 in the line but got a good view of him when he vanished in the trees. Sooo cool – my first Lynx/Bobcat.

Just before we left it started snowing again - thick heavy flakes. They may have snow till June

One of the early jumpers landing around 70+m

Martin Schmitt in flight, landed in the red area – 130+m

Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes, landing past the red – 142m

Me and the Germans – Martin Schmitt on the left

Views weren’t as nice today – the snow-loaded clouds were drifting into the valley

Not my picture but that’s what it looked like when I saw the animal

Ever heard of Duesseldorf?

Vancouver used to be the #1 city to live in when I moved here - or tied with Sydney, Australia, can’t remember for sure. Having been to both cities I could not agree more. This morning I heard on the radio that “we” dropped to fifth place – which is still not bad out of 220 cities. BUT we are tied with Duesseldorf, Germany. I couldn’t believe my ears. I can’t think of anything special about Duesseldorf, except that it is the middle of the most industrial area of Germany (old coal mining town). And even more surprising – Frankfurt comes right after. I have been there multiple times and would never want to live there. It does have a much better infrastructure though than Vancouver. For an outdoors person like me though that counts less than having an ocean and mountains right on my door steps – I don’t think though that aspect was part of the study:-). By the way, the first US city listed was Honolulu in 29th place.

The top 10 cities (overall quality of life):

 1) Vienna, Austria

 2) Zurich, Switzerland

 3) Auckland, New Zealand

 4) Munich, Germany

 5) Duesseldorf, Germany

 5) Vancouver, Canada

 7) Frankfurt, Germany

 8) Geneva, Switzerland

 9) Bern, Switzerland

 10) Copenhagen, Denmark

 

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/315297#ixzz1fGH0wVWE

 

Some other notables of today:

• I got home BEFORE Jeff which hasn’t happened in months.
• I managed to even get an erg workout in before dinner.
• Between dinner and bed Jeff and I spent most of the evening waxing skis or packing clothes for the weekend:-)

My Remembrance Day

Being born and raised in Germany, I have a lot to not to forget. Although I was born long after the war when times were good, my grandparents raised their kids (my parents and aunts and uncles) during and post war – World War 2 that is. With my family, we never talked much about the war when I was young. My most vivid memory comes from my Oma. She always told me about the Canadian soldiers arriving in my home town after the war giving her chocolate – at that time my mom was just a baby. I think that’s were my love for this country (Canada) was planted. Even though I much prefer German/Swiss chocolate over Canadian chocolate, in the time of the greatest need any chocolate can bring happiness.

Ironically my grandma died on the day the German’s celebrate ”Tag der deutschen Einheit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reunification)” – not the same year the Wall between East and West came down but I ALWAYS remember that date.

For My Mom

A couple of weeks ago my dad emailed me that my mom broke her ankle and I still haven’t managed to call her. Bad daughter, I know. Problem is the 9h time difference and me not being a morning person. So I need at least an hour in the morning to be able to talk to anyone – that’s why I try to start work early before the engineers so I don’t have to talk to anyone right away. By the time I get back home my parents are asleep and when they wake up I am asleep. There are weekends you would say but again the last two weeks were all busy – paddling, fishing, boat house clean up day ….. I know not a good excuse but I will call tomorrow – first day where I can sleep in for some time! My excuse is though that it took my dad 2 weeks before he emailed me what happened!!!

To make up for it I’ll be sending a card as well:

Holidays in Germany – Dec 24, 2009 – Jan 4, 2010

We are back from our 10 days in snowed-in Oldenburg. White Christmas in Oldenburg only happens once in a decade if not less often. I actually can’t remember ever having a white Christmas while still living at home (that’s for 18 years). But this year was one of those rare ones. We landed in Amsterdam at 7:45am in the morning of Dec 25th after leaving Vancouver at 8:30am on Dec 24th on Alaskan/NWA (connecting through Seattle). It was still pitch dark and it was snowing when we landed. Only a light cover but definitely collecting on the ground. My dad and brother who picked us up from the airport said it didn’t start snowing until just before Amsterdam. On the drive home it was snowing the whole way. It all melted away on Boxing Day only to return with a vengeance on Dec 31st. Luckily the landscape is completely flat so no hills to worry about while driving.

My mom spoiled us with her German style cooking and we had more meat in those 10 days than we usually eat in 2 months. But it is soooo tasty. And the German bread – yummy. To date I still can’t fully get used to the soft bread you get in most countries such as Canada and Australia. And off course we brought back tons of chocolate – it better will last past January this time. I gained about 6lb – yuck – only exercising once.

All in all we had a great time. Friends from University visited us in Oldenburg and I met with a couple old school friends – one of them I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. Partying with friends of course meant a lot of drinking and I have to admit that I lost my ability to drink a lot of beer – Jeff though managed to keep up with the visitors like a pro.

One of the highlight was a visit to a shipyard in Papenburg that builds those big cruise liners (traveling to Alaska size). Unbelievable what they put onto those ships – ice rink, golf course, spas or water slides reaching 30min beyond the side of the ship. All that pomp and glory – like watching Titanic all over again. Unfortunately the tour is in German only and I can’t recommend it to any of my English speaking friends.

I was also surprise about the increase in wind energy farms all over the place. On Christmas Day 82% of all the energy used in and around Oldenburg came from wind energy. Pretty amazing even though it was a low usage day. On a heavy usage day (workday) the percentage went down to 42% – still not bad. Oldenburg won an award as best city in Germany in technological advancements and research in 2009.

The last day we left early to spend some time in Amsterdam. We had just enough time to do one of the “Krachten” tours on a small tour boat. At least it was out of the cold and the tour was given in 3 languages (Dutch, English, Spanish).

 

I wanted to get to the airport early due to the potential delay in security after the bombing attempt on a NWA flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, even though we were flying back on KLM. But my worry was unfounded. We didn’t have to go through security until we actually got the the gate – that limits the number of people to have to go through at once. It still took a while but I didn’t think it was any more intense than normal. But then the waiting started. First the plane wasn’t ready on time to be boarded. Apparently the cleaning personnel was delayed. When we finally made it onto the plane we were told that they loaded a wrong piece of luggage onto the plane that had to be removed. So we left the gate and parked somewhere on the tarmac to unload the luggage – 20mins. After that was done the pilot tried to start the engine again and some relay blew. So we had to go back to the gate and wait for an engineer to come on board and check the electronics – 20min. It took a hole lot more time than 20min for the engineer to solve the problem. By now we were sitting in the plane for 2hrs. But eventually it got fixed and we all thought this is it. But oh no – not even close. Apparently Holland’s airport regulations say that a dutch crew can’t work overtime without having an area to rest in. Since we were 2hrs late on a 10 hr flight we had to find room on the plane to allow the crew to stretch out their legs. The plane of course was fully booked – and lots of families with small kids. So regulations said that 6 passengers were selected by the ground crew to leave the plane and that they would TRY to find them accommodation for the night. You can image what kind of responds the ground crew got. We weren’t one of the selected passengers but those people did not leave without a fight. A couple passengers actually volunteered to stay behind instead but airport security didn’t want to hear about that. So it took another hour to sort things out. At the end the volunteers were allowed to leave the plane but they had to leave their luggage behind on the plane. I have never experienced anything like that – the one time a plane was delayed like this they switched out the crew instead of kicking paying passengers of the plane (that was in Vancouver on an American airline though).  

Translations – do I really still know German?

A friend asked me last week if I could translate a German document into English for him. It was some structural engineering report. I figured there will be a few technical words I won’t know but I could likely describe them in a way that my friend who is an engineer can understand the content. And so he did. BUT I am ashamed to say that it took me forever and I looked up most of the words – not only the technical ones. It seems that once I started to look up some words my brain got more and more lazy and instead of thinking about the translation I just quickly typed it into my online dictionary. I did learn a couple new words by 90% should have come to mind without looking them up.
I can converse in both languages okay (although my friends in German might not agree with that any longer) but I can’t translate one into the other in my head – weird.