Another day. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention yesterday was that because of the latitude and because it’s summer, the sun is out for a long time everyday. It rises before I get up at 6:15 and sets around 10:30-11pm.

Well, back to the normal day. I tried to stay up again to watch the World Cup game, but fell asleep who knows when. Korea won. When I woke up in the morning though, I was able to see most of the Turkey-Senegal game, which Turkey won in overtime.

Oh yeah, each morning the tour guide leads the whole tour group in singing this “good morning” song. I don’t participate in order to save myself from some self-induced embarrassment.

Well, our first stop of the day was the Banff Hot Springs. Now, when Stephen described this place, I was thinking a steaming, bubbling, rock-laden, maybe sulfur-smelling pool. Instead it was just a warm, chlorinated swimming pool, which you needed to pay 7 bucks to swim in.

Our next stop was Bow Falls. You all have to remember, I pass out whenever I close my eyes for a short period of time, so I really don’t know what goes on during the bus rides.

So, Bow Falls. This place looks like a cross between a waterfall and rapids. That’s really all there is to say. Well, one thing to note is that I’m trying to duplicate my nice picture of Long Lake from last year’s trip to JiuZhaiGou, so I’m taking pictures of myself against various backgrounds. Oh, and the parents grabbed the binoculars again, spying on a person lying on a rock across the river (topless). Turned out to be a fat guy (too bad for them…>_<).

Well, next was Lake Louise. There’s a really famous hotel by this lake called the Chateau de Lake Louise or something. Oh yeah, we saw this area from the ski lift yesterday. So, as we had time to spare there, Eric and I went on a canoe ride for half an hour. Now, you all must realize, I’m a weak, scrawny 16-year-old who really hasn’t canoed much in his life, so paddling the entire length of the lake was freakin’ tiring. It didn’t help that I had Eric telling me to paddle faster every 5 seconds, and also splashing me with water (the water temperature was 0 degrees Celsius). Eric did do a good job of steering, thanks to his boy scout experiences.

So when we got back on land, I ate some more (lunch time), and found out that my mom had wanted to go canoeing too. Oops.

Peyto Lake was our next stop as we headed north into Jasper Park, the last of the four Rocky Mountain Parks.

The highlight of our entire trip is the Columbia Icefield, which is a bunch of glaciers. At the Afabasca Glacier, our next stop, we got into these big Snow buses with big tires and stuff. The Snow Bus thing took us up the glacier. The ride up was slow as the buses can’t reach very high speeds. Once we got to our destination, I was pretty overwhelmed by the sights. It was really nice that there was a lot of sun so it wasn’t too cold. My mom kept on worrying that I would be too cold because I didn’t have a jacket, but I was fine. A bit nippy, but fine. It was pretty amazing just to think that I was standing on a 300-meter thick glacier. There was glacier water flowing all around us, which we collected and drank (it’s clean…all the guides joke that it hass kept tem in good health for 200 years), and the snow-capped mountains were right next to us! A really amazing sight.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that on our ride to the icefield, we saw two bears (one grizzly and one black)! Cool…they were just eating and chilling.

From Afabasca, it was onto our hotel for the night (last night’s hotel in Calgary, was sweet!). The guide put Shaolin Soccer in as the movie. I watched maybe the first 30 minutes, but got carsick from trying to read the subtitles on the tiny screen, so I went to sleep.

After dinner, the parents took another walk, so I tagged along. They walked to some supermarket that took us like over half an hour to walk to. Could have been faster, but we walked slowly. With water and fruit in hand, we walked back. Today was like my exercise day (I need to get in shape…>_<).

I’ve gotten so much sun lately that my arms are no longer pasty white, they’re tan (*shock*), and my nose is peeling skin from being sunburned (some of this was from the magnet picnic too). Well, enough about disgusting images like that, tomorrow I need to talk about the bling blinging HK guy on our tour group. Good night.