Winterlude

We’ve all heard about winter in Canada.  We’ve seen South Park episodes and heard jokes about it on TV.  I’m here to tell you that winter in Canada is exactly what I expected it to be.

In the park for Winterlude

Winter here is a lot like winter in Iowa.  It’s cold and windy and it snows a lot.  It lasts a little longer up here than at home.  The biggest difference is that at home, it snows 20” and it won’t snow again for a few weeks, and here it lightly snows almost every day, and it just piles up slowly.  At night, we can hear a notorious duo going down the street: a dump truck and his friend the snow blower, who fills him up before they go dump the snow in the river and start over.

Although the winter up here is pretty long and cold and snowy, it doesn’t get the Canadians down.  In fact, the city of Ottawa has a famous festival every winter called “Winterlude,” during which people come from all over Canada to help celebrate the season.  Winterlude just ended, and it was a lot of fun!  One of the downtown parks is full of huge ice sculptures (done as part of a worldwide contest), and Chad and I went to check it out one afternoon.  The ice was amazing, and the park also had hot cocoa stands and a “BeaverTails” hut and educational stations where we learned all about the Northern Lights.  Fun, right?

My favorite ice sculpture in the Winterlude park

Checking out the ice sculpture art

Ottawa’s winter is also home to the famous Rideau Canal Skateway.  It’s exactly what its name implies: when the canal that runs through the city freezes completely, skate rental stands pop up on the ice and it’s open for skating.  We went one weekend afternoon during Winterlude, and it was packed!  There had to have been hundreds of people having a great time on the ice.

We decided not to rent skates (because I was scared of how uneven the ice is), but instead to walk a portion of the frozen canal.  Each kilometer is marked with a sign (the open a 7.5 km stretch for skating, making it the world’s largest skating rink), so we walked to the 2km sign and back.  On our way, we stopped for our first Beaver Tail, with young children zooming past us like professional hockey players.

We decided on a Nutella Beaver Tail, and it was kind of like a funnel cake.  Super delicious and definitely addictive, I wanted another one for hours after leaving the canal.

A Beaver Tails hut right on the ice!

Yum!  Like a beaver-tail-shaped funnel cake drenched in
Nutella!

Winter here is definitely cold (I’ve worn snow pants on my walk to school to stay warm), but it is far from miserable.  So, even if we have a “White Easter” this year, I won’t be disappointed.  After all, I did always wish to have snow on my birthday (May 3) – maybe we will!