Hi Neil,
Thanks for posting your pictures. I look forward to going to Calgary in September.
Did you go to the famous Calagary Stampede during any of your years there? If so, I wonder if you would like to tell us what you saw and why it is famous. You only mentioned your city as "cowtown" once! What about all those genuine cowboys, those steer ropers, those bucking broncs? Even what about the famous West Edmonton Mall? Surely you went to your neighbouring city to that incredible town under glass?
A lot of stuff in Neil's area is under glass because of the deep snow and cold of their wintertime. It is a new experience to go to such a place as the West Edmonton Mall.
When we drove west across Canada from Ontario I remember how flat Saskatchewan was. Just like a table top. And all those fields! Northern Ontario and Manitoba were interesting because of extremely ancient mountains there. I kept telling the children we were driving near the toenails of mountains that were so old they had worn right down to this grim cliff-ridden remnant. That was some of the wildest land I've ever experienced. Beautiful, but grim. The province itself was quite lovely, and very open.
Then the land began to roll more and the wonderful shapes of the fields could be seen spread out on the rolling land like a huge and beautiful patchwork quilt with many shades of colour in the patches.
In Alberta we finally saw the very high mountains in the far distance. When we first saw them we thought we might be looking at clouds on the distant horizon of the flat land. As we drew closer they slowly began to look like the huge, young mountains that they are, spreading their many mighty peaks across the wide horizon of the flat land, fully from side to side. They were the mighty "blue Canadian Rockies".
When I looked at the photographs of Calgary you sent I immediately noticed the windows of all the buildings. They all look the same, rather deepset and narrow. Do you think that they are narrow because of the extreme coldness of your winters? As a Southern Ontario girl I don't know if I could take that deep, dry cold for such a long time every year. But I would love the plentiful sunshine of your winter!
I found it a strange experience inside a warm house in Edson, Alberta in winter, looking out at the sunny snowscape. The sun was shining brightly, and apparently with a lot of warmth, according to my Southern Ontario trained weather sense. It looked as though there was probably a crisp, lacy crust forming on the surface of the snow, with the underlying snow sinking below it. That's the falsehood my Ontario weather-reading skills provided. I went outside in my sweater for a few minutes, to check. It very comfortable in the sweater, to my surprise, but just for a few minutes. Then the deep cold began to penetrate, regardless of the tempting sunshine. Then I realized it was still far below zero and wasn't thawing at all! You can get frostbitten or frozen ears, fingers, and toes, and hardly notice it if you come from the damp winters of southern Ontario, where aching fingers don't signal freezing. I had never experienced such dry, deep cold anywhere before or since. I was there to help our daughter who was losing a baby. Later they had two healthy ones who were the teens who visited here recently.
n our valley my weather knowledge from Ontario was also led astray in the beginning. Wonderful fluffy white, tall and billowing cumulous clouds announce in Ontario that a thunderstorm's coming. It never fails there that once a week we had a strong thunderstorm. The Niagara Falls area of Souther Ontario is in a continental storm path. Here those majestic clouds hang up over the mountains and stay there. Beautiful as they are, they don't announce anything. Even when rain does sweep up the lake like a grey curtain we usually watch it go by on the other side of the lake. Right now we long for rain again, to protect our parched BC forests and our homes from forest fires again this year. It is maddening to watch the rain pass on the other side.
Like China, this is a huge country. It is the second largest in the world. Like China we have a wide range of landscapes and temperatures. We have nothing like the Dalian area, though. We are a northern nation, and the best we do for warmth is about what it used to be like in England around London. That's where there are still a lot of English people living on Vancouver Island, one of our warmest areas. The other is Southern Ontario where I was born. There we can grow soft fruits like peaches and apricots, but none of the tropical fruits. And there are no palm trees in sight anywhere, unless they are fake plastic ones around a used car lot to decorate the edges and make us think of sunny southern climes.
Warmly, Mary
