Hello and welcome to the Q-Lips English Podcast.
This is bonus episode number 169 and I am your host and your study buddy, Andrew.
What I do here in the bonus episode series is I tell you some stories from my everyday life as a Canadian living abroad in Seoul, South Korea, And I hope that by listening to these stories, you will be able to improve your English fluency.
That's what we're all about here at Q-Lips, is helping you hit and achieve your goals with English.
So if that's what you want to do, then you're in the right place.
And I hope you'll enjoy my stories and find them useful for building your English skills.
So guys, in today's episode I'm going to tell you two short stories about spending some time in Canada.
I just went back to Canada last month for a week in the dead of winter.
And I'll tell you just about some of the highlights from that trip, some of the things that were memorable and fun to me.
So we'll get into that and I'll tell you those stories here in just a sec.
But before I do, I wanna let you know that there is an interactive transcript and a vocabulary glossary available for this episode for free for everyone, and you can get it just by following the link that's in the description.
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Okay.
And with that announcement out of the way, it's time to get started with my stories here for today.
And, as I mentioned, I have two of them and, fittingly perhaps, these are like really classic Canadian stories.
I think uh, winter stories, because of course I visited Canada in January in the dead of winter.
Like I said, and that's a great expression to know, in the dead of winter just means in the middle of winter.
So in the dead of winter, we also say in the dead of the night, in the middle of the night, I
I think those are the only two times we use it though.
I don't think I would say in the dead of summer or in the dead of spring.
That sounds a little strange to me, but in the dead of winter, in the dead of the night, you can imagine.
It's like those times when it almost seems dead outside right.
It's quiet.
There's no one around.
I think that's when we use this kind of expression.
So, in the dead of winter, i visited canada and i did two activities that were, i think, really stereotypically canadian and just really fun things to do in the winter when, to be honest with you, it's not the most vibrant or active or busy time in canada.
It's a little slow and not so exciting.
So Yeah, the first thing that I'll tell you about is ice skating.
Now, if you're a regular Q-Lips listener, you may have heard the episode that I recorded before I went to Canada.
And maybe I'll put the link to that episode in the description for this episode.
So if you haven't heard that, you can go back and listen.
And that's the story that I told before going to Canada, talking about some of the things that I was excited to do while I was there.
And one of the things I talked about was ice skating.
Now, there's this local ski mountain that's not too far from my hometown.
My hometown is called Kelowna, British Columbia.
It's in the west coast of Canada.
And in a neighboring city called Penticton, there's a ski mountain called Apex Mountain.
And I heard that they have this really cool outdoor skating loop.
It's like a one kilometer frozen river almost that they make and it goes through the forest and you can ice skate through the forest.
It's like a winter wonderland and yeah, actually i really wanted to do that and my brother, he's a really avid snowboarder, an avid somebody who's avid.
If you're an avid skier snowboarder, bird watcher, something like this means you're really passionate and you're really into this hobby.
So my brother's an avid snowboarder, meaning that he snowboards often in the winter.
And so he likes to go to some different mountains around in the region.
And he said that we could go to Apex and maybe do the skating loop together or he would go snowboarding.
And so I wanted to do that.
But when I looked on their website, I noticed that the skating loop was closed because of warm temperatures.
And so I saw that before I went to Canada and I was kind of crossing my fingers and hoping for a cold snap so the weather would turn worse.
I was hoping for bad, cold winter weather so that I could do the skating loop, but that never happened.
It's been a super mild winter in Canada, at least in Kelowna this year.
And I think they haven't even really gotten too much snow at all.
It was totally green while I was there and the temperatures were above zero, which is pretty unusual, I think, for that area of the world in the winter.
Of course, in typical Kelowna fashion, it was gray and overcast almost every day.
My hometown is in this valley.
There's a lake in the middle of the valley, which is awesome.
It's really beautiful in this huge, awesome lake.
And because of that valley, often the valley will fill up with clouds in the winter.
And it means like it's almost gray and overcast every day, which is really depressing.
And so it was like that while I was there.
And so, yeah, that's kind of a bummer.
And then the other thing that was a bummer was it was too warm for the skating loop.
So it was closed and we couldn't go there.
However, the mountain where my brother usually goes snowboarding, it's called Big White.
Big White was open.
Big White, I guess, is at a higher elevation.
Maybe it's a bigger mountain higher up in the hills and Big White was open.
They had some snow.
My brother said the snow wasn't great, but they've got some snow and they have an ice rink.
It's not like a cool forest loop or anything, but they had an ice rink.
And the good thing about visiting Big White is usually you get through the clouds.
So because...
Kelowna's in this valley, you have like very low hanging clouds.
So if you go up into the mountains, you can actually go through the clouds, and then it's beautiful, sunny weather.
And so, after being in Kelowna for a few days, I think I was complaining like ah, it sucks that we can't go to the skating loop.
Ah, it sucks that it's so gray and cloudy outside.
Really feels depressing after only being there for a couple of days, waking up and it being gray and then just staying gray all day.
So i was probably moaning a little bit about that.
So my brother said hey, let's go to big white and i'll go snowboarding.
If you want to join me and go snowboarding together, we can do that.
Or if you don't want to do that, then we can go ice skating.
Actually, he didn't want to go ice skating so much as he wanted to go snowboarding.
So he said, if you don't want to go snowboarding, you can go ice skating and I'll go snowboarding.
And so I thought, Hey, yeah, let's do it.
Now, to be honest with you, I really wanted to go snowboarding.
Like I used to do it when I was a teenager and probably into my mid twenties.
I kind of stopped snowboarding in my mid twenties for whatever reason.
It's an expensive hobby and it requires a lot of gear and equipment.
And as I moved away from Canada and started moving from place to place to place, it became a hobby that I just couldn't keep up with.
So I used to snowboard.
I used to ski growing up.
But yeah, since my mid-20s, I've kind of stopped.
So that's like 15 years probably now at least.
And so I really wanted to go snowboarding.
I wanted to relive those glory days on the board.
And I do have lots of great memories of snowboarding, but I'm a chicken now.
Like I'm so worried that if I fall that I'll just break every bone in my body or I'll crash into a tree or something like I don't know.
I don't have any confidence on the board anymore.
I'm sure that if I got out there and actually snowboarded, then it would probably be fine and I'd have a great time.
But yeah, I just, I don't know.
I'm running a marathon coming up soon in March and that was my only thought.
I guess this is how dedicated I am to the marathon is like if I fall while I'm snowboarding and I break my ankle, or if I bruise my knee or something and I can't run the marathon.
That would be so devastating.
So yeah, I passed on the snowboarding.
My brother went snowboarding and I instead went to the outdoor ice pond that they have at big white.
So this is just a really cool facility.
I don't think it's a natural pond.
They've built it, but yeah, it's really cool.
It's beside the village.
There's two villages at big white and. it's sort of fun.
You pull up and you hit the first little skiing village and there's a gondola.
And if you ride the gondola up to the second main village area then there's lots of activity up there.
There's restaurants, there's cafes, there's I don't know hotels and homes and all of these types of things.
So at the very first entrance to the And we arrived there and my brother immediately went up to go snowboarding.
He got on the gondola, but I stayed at the lower level and he lent me his ice skates and he had an ice hockey stick as well.
And so I got on the hockey skates and I went out onto this pond to go skating.
And it was awesome, guys.
This was probably like 10 in the morning or so.
And there were only a few other people out on the pond.
There was a family with like two little kids.
And I think all of them were learning how to ice skate.
The parents and the little kids were all learning how to ice skate at the same time.
So they were just taking up a very little portion of the pond.
And when I say pond, it was quite big.
Like I would say probably four, 500 meters wide.
So it's like a soccer field.
Think about a soccer field.
It's probably similar size to a soccer field, the size of this pond.
And it was also zambonied.
Now a zamboni is this cool machine that if you're a Canadian you will know this word zamboni.
But maybe other parts of the world you don't know what a zamboni is.
So let me explain.
It's a vehicle or a machine that goes over the surface of an ice arena and to make sure that the ice is really smooth.
So what it actually does is it puts hot water onto the ice and it kind of melts the ice and makes it uniform and level.
And then the ice refreezes and it's all really smooth.
So for events like ice hockey, figure skating, these kinds of ice sports, we need a Zamboni to make sure that the ice is nice and flat and level and smooth.
And so this outdoor pond even had a Zamboni.
So the ice was in perfect condition.
And yeah, I guess, because I was there early in the morning, I kind of beat the rush and Yeah, it was just so, so fun to get on my skates and go out there and hold my ice hockey stick.
And just like I mentioned earlier, we were above the clouds.
So it was a bluebird day is what the people in Kelowna call it.
I'm not sure if this is an expression that's spread everywhere in the English speaking world, but maybe some local regional slang.
A bluebird day, just meaning that the sky is totally blue, right?
So.
Really cool to be outside skating around.
On one side, I could look at the village.
On the other side is just forest and these snow covered trees.
So that was really cool.
Unfortunately, I didn't have an ice hockey puck with me, but I did have my ice hockey stick and I hadn't been skating in a long, long time.
I did go ice skating here in Seoul.
At the City Hall, there's a little ice rink that opens in front of City Hall in the wintertime.
And my wife and I went there a couple of years ago now probably to go skating.
But I wouldn't really call that real skating, because the skates that you get to rent there are just these terrible quality plastic skates.
And there are so many people on the rink and the ice quality is not so great.
So yeah, it was fun.
It's a cool thing to do.
And if you're ever in Seoul in the winter, I recommend going to City Hall and skating.
Definitely super fun.
However, it's not real ice skating.
So to get on my brother's ice hockey skates he has these good, high quality ice hockey skates that he lent me to have the stick and just to get out there on the open ice and really give her like, really try and skate fast and just uh, have fun out there.
That was awesome.
I hadn't done that in forever.
And it's just an incredible feeling, just really going fast and then doing a stop and spraying all the ice up and skating backwards and doing some sharp turns.
It was fun.
So I probably was skating out there for about an hour or so.
So that was really awesome.
And then finally, people started to slowly come onto the ice and come onto the ice and it got busier and busier and busier.
And one kind of funny story that happened while I was there skating was i was skating by these three women.
I guess they were probably in their early 20s, let's say, i don't know, 20 to 25, somewhere in that age range, and they stopped me and they said hey, you're so good at skating, just boosting my ego right away, and they're like i how are you so good at skating?
Can you teach us how to skate?
And they were from Australia and it was their first time ever trying ice skating.
And that's one cool thing about visiting Big White actually is, I don't think I talked with anybody other than my brother, who didn't have an accent.
Like there are so many people who come from other countries to big white, especially from Australia and the UK.
So there were these three women who stopped me on the ice rink and they were from Australia.
And then a little bit later I met my brother and I had to ride that gondola up to the second village.
And the guy that I rode the gondola with was from the UK.
And then afterwards my brother and I had lunch at one of the little restaurants in the village, and our server was also from Australia.
So it was cool to hear all these different accents, but I was like nobody here is from Canada except you and me.
I said that to my brother.
And so yeah anyways, that's kind of a cool thing about visiting Big White is, if you want to get exposure to many different kinds of English accents, you can do that.
Yeah, anyways, the three Australian women stopped me on the ice and they really pumped my tires.
It's another kind of Canadian slang term meaning to make you feel good by over complimenting somebody, right?
So they're like, Oh, you're so good at skating.
How do you do it?
They wanted to get some tips about how to skate because it was their first time ever ice skating.
You can imagine being from Australia.
You probably don't have too many opportunities to do that in Australia, right?
I said, well, first of all, I'm not that good at skating, but thank you.
Second of all, I hadn't skated for maybe 10 years.
So I was pretty rusty.
I didn't think that I was skating too poorly, but also not too great at the same time.
So I was like, I haven't done this for a long time.
So I'm not a great teacher.
And then I thought about it.
I was like, how can I teach you how to skate?
And my mind was blank.
It was like one of those things.
Skating is one of those things where I...
It's almost like being a native speaker of a language and trying to teach your language without studying it first.
Right?
Maybe you've had this experience where somebody's asked you about the grammar in your language.
I know this happened to me before I studied to become an English teacher.
People would ask me questions about English grammar and My mind would go blank.
I'm like, I don't know how to explain it.
I know what is right.
I know what is wrong, but I don't know how to explain it.
Same was for ice skating.
I was like, I know how to do it, but I don't know if I can teach you how to do it.
But I tried my best.
I gave them some tips and I let them borrow my hockey stick.
And they were skating around.
And actually, I was really shocked because they were doing so well after only one day.
I honestly didn't believe that they had only skated once in their whole life, that that was their first time, because they were doing so well.
So anyways, that was a little funny encounter on the ice rink.
And I just had an awesome time.
It was really a 10 out of 10 experience skating up there at Big White.
And then, like I said afterwards, I rode the gondola up to the main village and my brother and I had a great lunch and just hung out, spent the day there.
And then we went back into Kelowna in the afternoon.
And the second story I'll tell you here, and I'll try to keep this one a little short and tell you quickly.
But I did another activity related to ice, and that is I watched an ice hockey game.
So in my hometown we don't have the NHL, the National Hockey League, the North American Professional League.
However, we do have a league that's like a step down.
Usually players, this league is called the WHL, the Western Hockey League.
And it's made up of teams from the western part of North America.
So British Columbia Alberta, some of the western states in the USA, Washington States, maybe into Oregon.
I don't know how far it goes, but this region of the world.
And these guys are pretty good.
They're like one step down from the professional league.
And many of the players do go on to play in the professional league.
And they're probably...
16, maybe not that young, 17, 18, 19 year olds.
So young men, like older teenagers.
And yeah, the team in my hometown is called the Kelowna Rockets.
And we have a nice arena holds maybe if I had to guess 3000 to 5000 people.
So it's like a medium size arena.
And it's on a Saturday night when there's not too much else to do.
It's pretty bumping and it's fun to go there.
They've got a great atmosphere and you get to see some pretty decent quality hockey and the tickets are quite affordable and quite cheap.
And a lot of kids come out and families come out.
So it's just a good time.
And there happened to be a game on...
It's a Friday night or Saturday night.
I can't remember.
But one of those nights where it's the thing to do in Kelowna is to go and watch the hockey game.
So we were playing a team called Penticton.
Penticton where the Apex Ski Mountain is just a neighboring town.
And yeah, we got some tickets.
Now, there was a little bit of a mix up when we bought our tickets and it ended up being four of us who went.
I went with my brother and my sister and my brother's girlfriend and then also me.
So there were four of us.
However, we couldn't get four tickets in a row.
We had to break them up. such a popular hot event in Kelowna that there were no tickets.
So we had three seats that were together and then one seat that was separate, and nobody wanted to sit in the one solo seat.
So I volunteered.
I'm like, I don't care.
I'll go sit in the solo seat.
I'll be by myself.
We were in the same section, but we were like 10 rows apart from each other.
So everybody else was back and i was in the front row right up at the glass.
So that's why i wanted to sit there is because i've never been so close to the action.
So that was really really cool to sit right up in the front row behind.
I was just a little bit behind the net and right up on the glass by myself.
I want to say that the game was fun, but it was pretty boring.
The colonna rockets They were terrible.
I have to admit, they lost the game 5-0.
Penticton had five goals.
Kelowna had zero goals.
So there wasn't even really anything to cheer for.
It was really cool to see these very high level elite athletes so close and to see them body check, because hockey is a really physical game, right.
So they're always body checking and hitting each other and they'd smash right in right in front of where I was sitting and the boards and the glass would shake.
And yeah, that was pretty intense and loud and physical.
So I thought I really got a new perspective for ice hockey, some angle, some view that I had never seen before.
So that was really awesome.
However, yeah, Kelowna Rockets, just terrible.
I felt like that.
I think after those Australian women boosted my ego so much, telling me that I was such a good skater, in my head I was like to the Kelowna Rockets.
I felt like asking them if they needed some help.
Maybe I could get out there on the ice and give them a goal or something, because I felt like wow, they were just not playing so well.
That night wasn't their night.
One thing that was crazy, though on the opposite side of the ice in the final five minutes or so of the game, there was a big body check.
I didn't really see which team hit which team, so I can't remember, but two of the players hit each other up against the glass like they do in ice hockey, and they went right through the glass.
The glass didn't shatter.
In fact, it's not really glass.
It's like plexiglass, this plastic material, but that plexiglass popped right out of its supports whatever holds it in there.
And the players went right through the glass and the glass like fell down on the people who are watching.
And that was really wild.
Like I've never seen that before live.
I've seen that sometimes it happens in the professional league, where very, very rarely, but it does happen from time to time.
But to see that happen while I was watching the game and to be also sitting in the front row at the exact same time kind of got me a little bit nervous.
I was glad there was only five minutes left in the game.
Thankfully, I don't think anybody was hurt and they were able to clean it up and everything and get it back.
And Yeah, actually at that time the score was already five nothing.
So I thought maybe we should just go home.
I don't think Kelowna is going to be able to redeem themselves and win this game.
And it did take them like 15 minutes to get the glass back in place and everything cleaned up and ready to go again.
So I kind of wanted to leave, but We stuck it out and it's been a very, very difficult year to be a hockey fan for me.
The Kelowna game that I saw, terrible.
My favorite ice hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks, the professional team, terrible.
Canada, we had a very, very heartbreaking, devastating Olympics.
Both the men and the women's teams won silver medals, which sounds great, silver medal, but...
We lost to the Americans in both games, both the men's and the women's.
The Americans are our rivals, and that was a very, very tough pill to swallow for Canadians.
That happened last week, and I think we're still mourning that loss.
Hats off to the American teams.
They both played really well and the better teams won.
I think they won fair and square, but sucks to lose.
And so yeah, just been a very, very difficult, maybe the worst year of being an ice hockey fan that I can ever remember.
So yeah, the game itself wasn't so good, but the atmosphere in the arena was really cool.
And there are two things that I want to tell you about quickly before I wrap it up here, which make an ice hockey game so fun to see.
And if you ever do go to Canada and it's the ice hockey season I highly highly, highly recommend going to see a game, whether it's the NHL, the professional level, or the WHL or a junior level game as well.
You'll have the same kind of fun atmosphere.
And I think it's a really nice way to experience Canadian culture.
So I would really encourage you.
Even if you don't know anything about ice hockey, you could go and experience it and have a fun time.
It's a really cool cultural activity to do, I think, as well.
And there are two things that you'll see at almost every major or major junior game.
And that is first of all during the intermission, which is the break time that they take in hockey.
They play for 20 minutes.
A 20-minute section is called a period.
And then they take an intermission for 15 minutes, just a break to clean the ice, to zamboni the ice and to give the players some rest time as well.
So during the intermission, they always have little kids come onto the ice and play.
They have like a little kid game and the kids are, I don't know five, six years old, probably around that age.
And it's so funny and so cute because these kids can barely ice skate and they have no idea how to play the game.
So there's no structure or organization to them playing.
And usually in ice hockey you have five players versus five players, but they always have like 15 kids versus 15 kids.
It's just chaos out there.
And you see all these kids skating together in this big pack chasing after the puck.
And often they don't even know which way to go.
So they're shooting the puck in the wrong direction or shooting it in the in their own net by mistake.
It's just so funny and cute.
And I would say it's about a hundred times more entertaining than the actual hockey game itself.
Like I think if they just played this on TV, I would tune in to watch.
It's super, super awesome and very cute and very funny.
So that's great entertainment during one of the intermissions.
They always have those little kids playing.
And then another thing that's really fun about an ice hockey game is something called the 50-50.
The 50-50.
A 50-50 is a kind of lottery.
You can buy a 50-50 ticket and the tickets are always pretty cheap.
You can buy like maybe, I don't know, 20 tickets for $10 or something like that.
And it's not gonna be break the bank.
You can buy a bunch of tickets for a cheap price and you have to buy your tickets, usually before the end of the second intermission.
And then they do a draw and they find who the winner is.
And if you win.
All of the money from the ticket sales is gathered up, right?
And then 50% of the money goes to the winner of the lottery and the other 50% goes to charity.
So it's just a good way to raise money for different community organizations for charity, and also just a fun event too.
Like everybody loves the 50-50 event.
And around the arena you'll see people selling 50 50 tickets and you can buy some and try your luck.
And usually it's a decent amount of money.
The prize for the game that I was at was $13,000.
So that means that they had raised over $26,000, right?
13 for charity and then 13 to the winner.
But it's a little bit stressful when they call the winner.
I didn't win, so I didn't have to worry about this, but.
They made an announcement like here's the 50-50 winner and they call out the ticket number and the ticket number is pretty long.
Like it's like maybe a 10 digit number or something, right?
It's a long number.
And because the tickets are fairly cheap, a lot of people will buy like a big string of 20 little tickets and they're all in a link.
Like when you buy them, they just give you this long link of tickets.
And so they call out this long number and everybody's going through checking their ticket to see if they win and checking all the numbers on their tickets.
And some people have like 20, 50 tickets.
So there's a lot of numbers to check.
And the thing is you have to go to the ticket office within 10 minutes of them calling that number to claim your prize.
And if you don't go there within 10 minutes, then I think they give 100 of the money to charity, which is cool, but it's pretty stressful.
Like when they call it, everybody's frantically looking because you have to see if you got the winning number.
And then stupidly, this is what caused me a little bit of stress.
They only display the number for like a minute and then they didn't show it anymore.
You think that they would have it on the Jumbotron, the big TV above the arena, and just have that number there so you could check with it.
But they didn't.
So yeah, everybody's like, what was the number again?
Yeah, so everybody's frantically looking for their tickets.
And then five minutes later, they made another announcement.
Like the winner hasn't come forward yet.
Here's the ticket number one more time.
And so my heart was beating fast.
Like, oh my gosh, $13,000 is a lot of money.
And you want to to win it.
So yeah, if whoever won was in the bathroom or something or on a phone call and just didn't hear the announcement, that could have been a lost opportunity right for some big winnings.
So yeah, that was stressful.
However, it was announced that the winner had claimed their prize, And so I guess somebody was able to match their ticket number to the winning number and then run to the ticket office and claim their prize in time.
But I thought that was funny and a little bit stressful, but just a good overall activity, a good way to raise some money for charity and to boost the atmosphere in the arena for an otherwise pretty lackluster, boring ice hockey game where we got blown out five to nothing.
So...
Yeah.
Anyways, everyone, I think I'll end this here.
I've been rambling on long enough.
Thank you for listening all the way to the end.
And if you did make it this far, make sure to give yourself a pat on the back because you're doing what you need to do to improve your English fluency.
We know that you need to spend a lot of time with the language.
You need to get it into your brain.
You need to make English a part of your regular everyday lifestyle.
And you did that by spending time with me here today, listening to my stories.
So awesome job.
Keep up the good work.
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And I'll be back soon with another brand new Q-Lips episode.
Until then, goodbye.
