I've touched down in Cowboy City

So after saying good bye to my relo's and Jenny from Vancouver and getting dumped off I was on the move again to my home city for the next 5 months, Calgary.

It was about 8.30pm at night and it was pitch black when I looked outside the window, however when we were about to land I glanced out the aircraft window one more time and I can make out that there was snow everywhere on the side of the roads. I couldn't believe it was snowing. Once the aircraft landed and we disembarked from the plane and went to collect our luggage. As I was waiting for my luggage, there were statues of cowboys around, people wearing cowboy hats and advertisments all around advertising the Calgary Stampede. I was in Calgary and it was very cowboyish from what I gathered, but the funniest thing was as I was waiting I heard over the PA "Final calls for all passengers flying to Virgina, could you please head to Gate 3 immediately" and I was like that just said Virgin, rather than Virginia, I guess that's how they pronounce it over here.

Anyway after collecting my luggage I went outside to take an aiport shuttle downtown to the HI Youth Hostel. It was -12 degrees, it was like standing in a freezer. My hands slowly got colder and colder and I slowly couldn't feel my ears so I kept on rubbing them every 5 minutes or so to make sure they didn't fall off. No doubt it was cold here, one thing is for sure when I head home I won't be whinging about the stupid cold over there.

lI met another few Aussies working around several mountains Alberta. I guess this is pretty common for Aussies. There was one European bloke that came up to us while we were sitting on the couch in the hostel and asking us. "Why do Australians like Calgary so much?" because It became pretty obvious that the hostel was infested with Aussies. But we were all pretty much there for the same reason which was to work at the snow.

The following day, I met up with a couple of the Aussies I met from the night before to head downtown to get a bank account and get my SIN number. It was only -7 degrees. There was a little bit of snow on the streets well more than what Mt Buller already had for the season. Calgary seemed very gloomy because of the coldness and there wasn't much colour, my first impression was it looked like the ally way in America. It wasn't a big town but I still got lost a bit. They city is pretty much in blocks like Melbourne but they name there horizontal streets in numbers like 1st ST SW, 2nd ST SW and so on and then the intersecting vertical streets are Avenues so like 1st AVenue, 2nd Avenue and on. So it really wasn't too bad. There is a section of the city that has free train transit which was pretty cool and handy.

After we got our important things out of the way we just walked around the city and once it got too cold we went back to our hostel and bummed around for the rest of the day. I was getting picked up tomorrow so we can finally check into our staff accomodation.