Christmas activities

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the late update. Last post, I promised that I will be updating 'tomorrow' but that 'tomorrow' became the next day, the day after and finally the day after the next. In other words, procrastinating.

Well, let's have a recap of what happened over the Christmas season. My Christmas holiday actually started on the the 23rd, which was my birthday with the completion of my term graduate school requirements. I really thought that I would be celebrating my birthday in the lab as I was soo busy the entire week finishing up my requirements but thankfully, I was able to slack-off in the evening. We went for an exercise in the evening and was actually a good way to detoxify my body of stress. Highly recommended!

The following day, Christmas eve, my family and I attended church service together for the Christmas mass. There's a church about half a kilometre away from home and even though it we opted not to attend the traditional midnight service, the church was very much jam-packed with people. Being a regular of that church, I must say that a lot of people were not from Winnipeg or probably originally from Winnipeg but are on vacation to spend Christmas with their respective families. As it should be, church time is not the time to people watch but let's say I got really somewhat sinned for watching people in their Sunday's best. Well, oh, well you just cannot help it :)

And then Christmas day, we were invited by Dan for a traditional Ukrainian-Canadian Christmas dinner. Boy, I must say that the food was awesome! Dan for the first time stuffed some turkey and tried his luck in Asian cooking. We had stuffed turkey (traditional Canadian/North American), perogies (Ukrainian-Canadian), sweet and sour Chinese meetballs, mashed potato, and traditional Ukranian soup. For dessert, I made fruit salad. Mmmmm, writing this makes my mouth water and crave for them!

After dinner, I tried my luck in revitalizing my long-lost computer game psychic skills but to no avail. I feel so old when I see the gaming hardware that we have today. As you know, in my generation (geez, I feel so old), we were exposed to atari, nintendo family computer, sega, and game boy. But kids today have a lot to choose from - from playstation to NES, Xbox to GameCube you name it. As it turns out, Dan is an avid and very competitive gamer, and after dinner, I tried my luck playing nintendo's GameCube with games such as Mario Party (this game is awesome), Mario Tennis (the game I liked most - tennis sprinkled with a little bit of fantasy, Roger Federer will surely loose his number one ranking if these guys were humans), Mario Cart, DonkeyKonga (a miniaturiazed version of DanceCraze where you use bongo drums), and Mario Superstar Baseball. It was really fun to play video games after long years of hiatus; however I can`t help it always placing last in all except Mario Tennis. I think I already have a learning disability when it comes to new generation of video games. All in all, we ended up the evening happy - kudos to Dan for being such a good host - fantastic food, great company and great video games.

Next day is a big day as well. In Canada, the 26th is one if not the busiest time of the year for Canadian retailers - Boxing day. No, no it's not the day where people 'box' each other, its the time of the year where Canadians camp out of the malls and retail stores to be early and beat the rush of people trying to get the best shopping deal. Traditionally, its been a day where people open their gifts, thus the word 'box'. The holiday is mostly celebrated in commonwealth countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Even though we were up until 2ish the night before, we started our boxing day shopping really early - at 9am. Reliable Dan gave us a wake-up call and a ride (thanks a lot!) since Winnipeg shopping malls are far apart from each other. Because of the cold weather, taking public transit is not recommendable as well and it's really a given to drive a car to have the most comfortable shopping experience. We shopped at Regent, a huge strip mall complex along Lagimodiere Blvd. in the northeastern portion of the city. In the afternoon, we decided to head to St.Vital Mall where the crowds were not as bad as I expected. I was expecting long queues and elbow-to-elbow stream of humanity but what I saw was like regular weekend mall traffic. It might be because it's already afternoon and majority have already started going home done with their boxing day shopping.

The 28th was my bon voyage and belated birthday party. I invited a couple of people to have a taste of traditional Filipino cuisine. I also made crema de fruta, a cake dessert made from layers of graham crackers and fruit cocktail. I was really happy that they really like it, its a much needed confidence-booster for my cooking as I had a couple of bad cooking outcome before that :) Pictures are posted here.

The next few days were actually spent preparing for my departure to Switzerland. It was hectic and stressful as you worry about stuff that you must accomplish in Canada and that you might forget doing something before your departure. I cleaned my room, packed my luggages, said goodbye to my family and friends, and slept for the last time in Winnipeg.