Mooritzzz in Canada: 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.