Christmas

Hey folks, how are you doing? I'm fine here in our white envrionment.Yes, you're reading correctly. Finally we have some snow also in the village. It snowed 50 cm in the last couple of days and the weather forecast promises more snow for the next days. Therefore now the season of snowbattles outside and building snowmen started definitely.. :-)
After i had my "shadow day" i could finally start to work last Monday. I had one lession in the afternoon. A private lesson for a father with his son and daugther. It was funny even if the kids were a bit tired after a 5-hour-flight from somewhere in the U.S. The next day i was on "stand-by" which means that you have to show up i the morning to see if there's a lesson for you. Unfortunately there wasn't any. On the 24. they called me off because there is just not enough work around. Normally this period of year is high season and there are so many lessons booked that everybody has to work all day. This year is kind of *****. Not a lot of snow, the world financial crisis and also this accident with the gondola. But what can one do except of keep being an optimist.. :-)
Today i could work again. First i had a lesson like my first one. A father with his two kids from the States. They were pretty good riders so we could actually go up on the mountains and hit some powder. Or at least we tried.. :-) After the lesson which brought me nice tip and a delicous caesar chicken salad i was booked for a beginner lesson. 3 adults and one kid who had never been on a snowboard before. So i started to explain what a snowboard is, where the nose and the tail is and how you attach it on your feet. Really funny.. :-) After 3 hours they were experts in sideslipping and doing pendulum due to me and all seemed very happy.
Tomorrow i'm booked again for some lessons. Let's see how they're going to be..

I hoped you had all nice Christmas. I was not really in a Christmas atmosphere even though we had a real Christmas tree a some chain of lights. On the 24. we went alltogether to the other student house and had a big dinner there. We were aproximately 25 people and everybody brought some food. In the end there was a multicultural dinner with food from Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, USA, Australia and Korea. It was so good that i ate too much and was knocked out for an hour before i could move again and eat the dessert.. :-)
The next day we hunted some powder and sometimes also some rocks and chilled it in the evening. That's how my Christmas looked like. Now i'm enjoying the last days of 2008 and looking forward to the New Year's party! Underneath some pictures from the last days:

"Blue trees in the village"
Our neighbour's house
Christmas dinner
On the hill

A sign of life from Canada

Hi guys, i know it's a long time since my last post. It was a busy time and finally i found some time to keep you up-to-date.
The most important thing during the last couple of days is that i got a job!! :-) I'm hired as a part-time snowboard instructor and will work two days a week. But if i act in a nice behaviour and do my work well i can get more work. At least i hope this. Also i got a season pass for the mountains which is great! And I can't tell how relieved i was after signing the contract...
Since then a lot of other things happened: Today i had my last training day from the snowboard school. Alltogether there are 3 training days outside on the hill and two information days inside. It was really funny too meet other instructors and get to know the Canadian way of teaching. Now i'm quite prepared and after my "shadow day" next Wednesday, which means that i'm going to join another instructor with his class for one day, i'm ready to work. Christmas is on the way and hopefully a lot of people. (and more snow) At the moment we have just 60 cm. Thus not a lot of runs are open and it's so crowded that it's not a big surprise if you hit someone.
Since yesterday however the people rather stay in their hotel because the temperature felt to -12 in the village and -24 on the mountain. It's just sick!! Yesterday i my nose went so white and that i almost lost it.. It was ******* cold! I've learned from my mistakes and wore two pair of gloves and 5 layers. In all those clothes i couldn't really move and i felt like a beginner who's trying to make his first turn. The next days those arctic conditions will last so i definitely have to buy a face mask or maybe a gangster-bandana?

Since the 29th of novembre i'm now living in a student house with other work-and-study students. I really enjoyed the last week with my homestay family. Two days before i left we celebrated American Thanksgiving because the homestay mother grew up in Philadelphia. She invited a whole bunch of neighbours and with them all their kids. Finally we were about 16 people, 5 kids in the age of 2 among us. You can imagine what kind of "tohuwabohu" it was.. :-) Kids playing there, kids crying here and so on. The meal however was so delicous that i don't know what word in english could describe it. A huge turkey with gravy, risotto, vegetables, cranberry jelly, and a lot of other nice food. I ate so much that i could hardly move after.. :-)

In our new home it's very comfortable. It's a two-storey house i an area about 10-bus-minutes outside of Whistler. There are 7 bedrooms for two people each. I'm living downstairs with 3 other Suisse, one girl from Liechtenstein and a guy from Germany. We try to speak english together and we are quite succesfull. As soon as i have some pictures from our nice view i'll let you be part of it. The price we pay (german expression translated into english.. ) for the view is a 10 minute hike from the busstop and a lot of sweat from carrying the food to our house.
Unfortunately we're all not the best cooks and therefore we survived the first week with pasta. Now we really try to cook various food and i can improve my cooking skills as well as my english skills. :-)
We are in the middle of decembre and thus on the way to christmas. Yesterday we bought a christmas-tree. A real one, not a fake one which you can see very often here in North America. But there is still a lot to do to bring some christmas feelings in our house.
There's is still a lack of snow here in Whistler which makes it hard to keep being a optimist. Everybody is waiting for a big big dump of snow! :-)
Today i had no training and could go snowboarding for me. Unfortunately it was a really bad day. First i nearly broke my snowboard.. Too much jibbing and a stupid ice patch were too much for my old snowboard. I couldn't stick my pop 360, landed directely on the ice and a part of my nose popped off.. It was not big surprise. It was just a matter of time that something like this would happen to my old "senior" board. I'll go to a shop tomorrow and maybe a little bit of glue with extend the lifetime for a couple days or should i say runs?
The other bad thing today is actually pretty scary. After just a week of the opening of the Peak-to-Peak gondola which connects the two mountains and sets a world record for the longest gondola (!) a gondola from the village had a serious accident. One tower broke into two pieces and a few cabins almost fell down. Nobody got seriously hurt but it's really not good for the image of Whistler. If you're interested to read more here is the link: http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20081216/BC_blackcomb_gondola_081216/20081216?hub=BritishColumbia
Because of that this part of the ski resort was closed so everybody had to go to the other part with the peak-to-peak and then download on this side to the village. You can imagine how many people were waiting to go down. A huge line-up on the top and one at the mid-station. Crazy.
The time we got down there was no time to go back so we stayed in the village, went a little bit apres-skiing and the moved directly to school.
Now i'm sitting on the couch, trying to keep my eyes open and looking forward to my "shadow" day.
Enjoy the pictures beyond and soon i'll put some more on my blog! Peace out, greets.

Just another picture of the two cute kids.. :-)
Familiy picture
American thanksgiving, just delicious!
Derek and his friends. Aren't they cute?
2270 Brandywine, Whistler
My room: a bunk bed for kids and a little mess
Kitchen and living-room
Two friends from Vancouver brought a Gerber-Fondue. Yammy!
So proud of my new snowboard instructor uniform. Everything from Burton which is pretty cool.
Whistler skyline

A sunday in Whistler

Hi! Last sunday we checked out the local climing hall called "the core". It is a little hall in the middle of the village and the routes are the half length of the ones in the Magnet in Niederwangen. Before the fun got started we had to fill out a form and answer some funny questions. "When is the last time you belayed?", "Which devices to you use?", "Do you have a belay license"? and some others. So without a belay license which i think is a strange invention we entered the area. We climbed for about 3 hours which caused me some sore muscles in my forearm until now.. :-) I learned a lot of new vocabulary there and also a slogan which you use before climbing:
- "Ready for belay?"
- "Belay on.?"
- "Ready for climbing?"
- "Climb on."
The sounds like in the army..
After the session we moved our *** to a restaurant with suisse and german specialities. Quickly we decided to taste a Fondue. We heard that the cook of this restaurant is a Suisse and that he imports the cheese from Switzerland. But does he also now how to make it?
We were really surprised of the flavour so we ordered another one. Because the wine was inestimable we drank coke. We were the only one in the restaurant which din't bother us from enjoying this nice meal.
The tummy full of cheese we headed to the Longhorn and watched a movie premiere and drank some drinks. That's life in Whistler. What are you doing these days?
See you!

Tofino

Hello my dear audience. Last weekend we went to an amazing trip to Tofino. Tofino is a little town on Vancouver Island and is 369 km away from Whistler. We rented 3 cars for 16 people and after everybody arrived in the school the journey could begin. We drove into the direction of Vancouver and took the ferry to Vancouver Island. On this Friday it was raining cats and dogs (funny expression, isn't it?) and so it wasn't so comfortable to wait about 1.5 h in the car in the line-up in front of the ferry. They had the police on the ferry who frisked the whole boat for a reason they wouldn't tell us.
After the arrival on the island and a big shopping in one of those huge malls next to the highway we headed towards Tofino which is on the other side of the island. But a trip with 3 cars isn't so easy. A lot of the times we were too fast so the others couldn't follow us, hehe.. :-) It took us always a lot of time to meet again. We left the highway and took the road through the island. It was as dark as in the ass of a cow (sorry about this coarse expression) and it still rained as if the was a leak in the sewage system of Petrus. While we driving and enjoying the noise of the bad radion reception suddenly every car in front of us stopped. We had to pass a intersection where there was at least 25 cm of water on the street!! This section of the road was about 50 m long. On the left and the right side you could see water falls running down the hills towards the street. That was quite sick!
Another thing which was funny was that you could see a lot of pumpkins everywhere right next to the road. This must be a kind of tradition that you put your pumpkin after halloween just next to the main road. After every turn you could see the pumpkin staring the passing cars out of the forest.
After a 8-h-drive we finally arrived in Tofino. We installed ourselves in the two condos we booked for our 5-days-stay. Then we cooked a nice dinner and made a little house party.
The next day it was still raining but that couldn't keep us from going to the sea to watch the Volcom Stone's Beaverfish Surf Series Contest on Long Beach. To see them surfing motivated me so much I almoust grabbed any surfboard and jumped into the freezing sea. But I had to be patient.
Next day after curing everyone's hangover we packed our boardshorts and towels and headed to the surfschool. With all the equipment in a swiss army truck (yes that's true) we went to the Long Beach and tried to surf the Canadian waves. It was really different to my first surftrip this sommer in France. The water was about 12 degres cold so you have to wear a thick wetsuit with gloves, a hoodie and also some neoprene shoes. Fitted with all this equipment the surf could begin. We had a lot of fun although we didn't catch a lot of waves. After the surf session everybody needed something to drink because the saltwater dried up every throat. The owner of the our condos who also arragend the appointment whith the surfschool invited us to a 5 star hotel on the Beach. For mere mortals (Normalsterbliche?) like us it was impossible to stay there for a night. One suite costs about 400 to 1000 dollars a night.. But for one drink it was ok. Jorge the owner told us to drink a "Caesar" which is a special North American drink. I expected nothing special but after I tried I was shocked. The drink was spicy as chili and not really drinkable. :-) I don't reccomend it to you but if you are curious here is the recipe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_(cocktail)
The next day a lot of us went to a whalewatching trip, but me and 3 others stayed at home und went surfing again! I took a shorter board but I had to make a lot more effort on this one also because we partied very hard the night before.. :-)
On Tuesday it was time for us to leave this nice town. We said goodbye to jorge, the owner of the condos who housed us (beherbergen?) very good. On the return journey everybody was asleep in the car and exhausted of this long weekend. We had a great time and partied every night.. :-)
Jorge described Tofino like this: This drinking town has a surfing problem...

Now we are back in the every day life of Whistler, which is not so bad either. I'm still looking for a job as an instructor and hope that it'll work. Beside that there's a lot to do, even if there's no snow yet.
That's it for now. Below some pictures of Tofino. I have to go climbing now. See you guys!

Ferry to Vancouver Island

The men's corner
"Aha this is how we make the take-off."
The surfboard and me
Nice weather right? :-)
Surf Contest
A late night swimming action... :-)
My next car... Or maybe still the old Toyota without reverse gear for 15o bucks?
That doesn't belong actually in this post. But anyway: Beatiful B.C. on every car

Hey hou! As you know Halloween is a really big thing in North America. From "trick or treat" to pumpkin food and big partys, everything goes crazy on the 31th of Octobre. Below a few pictures from this crazy evening...

The king himself
almost...
grrr
the ladies with the aussie-teacher
From left to the right: turner (teacher), garth (teacher), jonas, steve (school director)

After this great evening everybody was lazy yesterday and Whistler looked like a lost village. The weather was also not very nice, it's too warm for snow... that means tv, tv and tv... and still waiting for the first snow in canada!
Beside this my search for an accomodation lasts no longer. I'll live in a student house for all the work and study students. It's a huge house for 18 people a few minutes outside of Whistler. The only thing I have to do is read the 15-page-rules-of-the-house and the sign it.
But the search for a job is still very difficult. I can't apply as a snowboard instructor before I've done a instructor course. The first one is in the middle of decembre. That means waiting and waiting which isn't very comfortable. If you look on the homepage of Whistle-Blackcomb it is written that they don't need any instructors. But steve, the school director assures us that he can arrange us an interview do it's still possible to get this job. That's why me feelings are very mixed and hope everything turns out good. It's also not very easy for me and I think also for other europeans to understand how Canada works relating to the job search.
I can assure you something: If I get this job, I'll make a huge party!! :-)
Ok that's it for now! Greets Moritz

Hiking tour with IH

Hey! Last Tuesday we went on a hiking trip with the school. After a few problems with the car - the driver broke the key in the lock, oh my god... - the trip could start. With two cars we drove out of whistler to enjoy the fascinating nature. The road was in such a bad condition that the car seemed to be a rollercoaster, particulary for the last bank... :-) Once we got there the good air healed everybody who got a little bit carsick. We walked around several lakes, took some pictures and ate our lunch. A few pictures:

The view out of the "rollercoaster"
lake
Posing
some other hikers (or posers...)

Jamming in Crystal Lounge

Hey dudes! I'm just coming back from a very nice evening! We went to a bar in which every sunday there's a jam session. So everybody can come and play. All instruments are there. Oh, it was so nice to play the drums again even if it's just a snare, hi-hat and a bass drum.. better than nothing, and you can have a lot of fun! The bar was full and the atmosphere wicked. Yeah that's all I wanted to say, have a nice time!
greets moritz
ps: maybe the next sunday I could take some pictures to show you...

1 month in Canada

Hey everybody!
I'm already one month in Canada now.. Time runs so fast here.. :-) The last week was very good. The school is very nice because there aren't a lot of students and It's almost like a big familiy. My teacher is the "director" of the school but not like in Switzerland. We had class together and went out together. It's funny to out with your teacher.
Beside the school I was shopping in the village and tried to get on with the village and streets which seem like a labyrinth. The people in the village are very nice and very outgoing. Even a 50-year-old office clerk asks you what you are doing here in Whistler and try to help you whereever they can. But it's crazy: Except on Tuesday you have a party in one club, at the weekend everywhere! And It's not even high season, how will it be in the winter?
But I've still got to organize a lot of things. I need the find an accomodation which is very difficult here and even more expensive than in Switzerland. But I think I'll stay in a student house with other work-and-study-students. Like a big "WG" which will be very cool.
Another problem is that I can't aply for a job as instructor now because I need to make a instructor course first. But I think It'll be alright, because the teachers from the school know nearly everybody and they can arrange an interwie with the employer.
Yeah that's it from now! I'll put you also some pictures from yesterday when I walked along the few lakes they have here..
See you! Greets Moritz

Just arrived in Whistler

Fall in Whistler
Blackcomb Mountain
My street
The house of the Perizzolo's
The living-room
Luna and Isabella
On the way to the village you can see this strange thing: a lot of shoes hanging on the rope over the pathway... Canadians are crazy!
Toy room of Derek...
The School
some classmates
asian students
Jonas and othersFlurinHanging around
Skatepark in Whistler
Uuh expensive
Ah, beautiful isn't it?