Well, it might not have that much snow here (was pretty disappointed when I got here yesterday!), but it’s definitely winter up the mountain!! It’s not a huge snowbase (~45cm – it’s the start of the season only), but it’s definitely chilly and windy and most definitely wintery up the mountain. I took the opportunity of having a break from practicing my talks (BenchMarking Via Weka and Joaquin’s Experiment Databases) in front of the bathroom mirror, bought a sightseeing ticket (quite pricey at 33 CAD!) and went up the mountain with the gondola lift. I was surprised, that I wasn’t really scared anymore of height. Maybe all that snowboarding up on Mt Ruapehu and taking the chair lifts there, helped curing me at least a little bit. 🙂
Anyhow, it was really cool up there, looking at all the ski lifts around one and all the peaks of the Canadian Rockies. Very impressive!! After freezing off my hands (me stupid, forgot to pack my gloves, being in such a hurry!), taking all those pictures, I decided to go inside and warm up a bit with a nice hot chocolate. Well, the chocolate wasn’t really hot, more like lukewarm, but still nice. But at one point, I had to face reality again and go back down (geez, huge queues, since everybody else had to get off the mountain as well!). And guess what, I met a few Australians in that gondola. One of them even mistook me for another Ozzy! How dare you!!! 😉 We even got stuck for a while, not sure why they halted the lift, but we had to wait for quite a few minutes before it kicked in again and brought us down safely.