Winnipeg

I must say it's been a bit tough getting my head back in the game this Monday morning after spending a nice weekend in balmy, dynamic, romantic Winnipeg.  I'm being somewhat sarcastic, but it really was a fun time and turning out to be a neat city.  Heather came out for a visit and following the Friday night Bengal Beer-Cal/initiation night for the new class, we headed down the road 45 minutes for a Winterpeg winter getaway.  It was fantastic being on the non-initiation end of the beer call and having Heather here to witness the shenanigans.  The highlight of the night for me was the social experiment we decided to conduct on this one guy by putting lime juice, ground up Cheetos and water in his shot-glasses instead of booze.  The jury is still out and the results are a little skewed I think due to his excessively high blood alcohol levels at placebo commencement.  Regardless, I'm sure his liver was thanking us the next day despite the mashed up Cheetos that some genius decided to start adding.  He really didn't seem to notice anyways.

We had a good time in Winnipeg and spent a large part of the day at The Forks, which is the part of the city where the Assiniboine and Red Rivers meet.  There is a 6 mile skating track on the river and three full size hockey rinks, so we laced them up and went for a rip.  There was a pretty sharp wind, so by about kilometer 3 I was slurring my words worse than Cheeto Placebo Man due to a frozen face.  I'm still not sure my feet are completely thawed out, so at least now Ihave an excuse for not being able to fly straight (for those who don't know airplanes are steered on the ground by the rudder pedals on the floor, which is also used for directional control in the air).  

Since it was a Winnipeg weekend we continued on with the theme and rented the movie/documentary "My Winnipeg" made by a local guy.  Being a Canadian production I had my seatbelt fastened for a weird and wacky over artistic, hard to understand, Canadian movie experience.  It didn't dissapoint on the whacky front and I'm still left wondering what was fact and what was fiction.  Did you know:  Winnipeg is the coldest city on earth.  It has ten times the rate of sleep walking of all cities in the world.  There is a civic law stating that no street signage can be destroyed and there is a sign graveyard somewhere in the area.    Cree legend has it that beneath The Forks of the Assiboine and Red Rivers, lies a subterranean meeting of two rivers which leads to the underworld.  For hundreds of years they would burn their dead there, at the confluence of this underworld.  The Arington street bridge which is one the major bridges in the city, was designed and built to span the Nile and be sold to Egypt.  Somebody screwed up and it ended up not fitting, so the city of Winnipeg bought it at a discounted rate.  "Garbage Hill", the only land mass remotely resembling a hill by BC standards, is composed of over half a century of the city's trash.  It's not uncommon for for thrill seeking toboganning children to impale themselves on old car bumpers, frost heaved and sticking above the surface.  The city's Legislature building is the biggest Masonic construction in the world.  Apparently, when it was built in the early 1900s, the Premier and all his cabinet members were Free Masons, so it was the Masons who did the building.  Winnipeg is home to the scorer of the fastest hat trick in NHL history in an eclipsing time of 21 seconds.  It was also the home of the first Canadian hockey team to win Olympic gold, which took place in Antwerp in 1920 and was considered the capital of international hockey in the 20s and 30s, hosting some the the initial Soviet-Canadian duels.  And last, but not least, the city was the site of "If Day".  In 1942, 5000 Rotary members volunteered to dress up as Nazi storm troopers and rain simulated terror on the city.  The disturbance was a campaign to promote the purchase of war victory bonds.  I'm still not sure how much of all this is really true.  I'm going to research it as it's all quite interesting.  I recommend the movie as well.

The winds are up today and clear hood 4 is approaches and landings.  Needless to say, conditions need to be almost perfectly calm to make learning productive, so I've got the day off to study.  My class is starting what is called a "Rumble Book", tradition and a place where everyone records the blunders and or stupid things they've done in the airplane so far.  My third flight last week was a tough one, so I am ready for a little group therapy.  More to follow on that...take care.