Exploring the nature

As we are in Canada and there is a lot of nature and mountains around here it didn't take long for me to go on my first hiking trip. (Careful readers might remember that I was on Grouse Mountain in Vancouver. However, I went up there with the gondola so it doesn't count as hiking.)
As already mentioned in the last post, on Saturday we went to Sun Peaks, which is a nice skiing resort about 45 minutes away from Kamloops. We went up there by bus and as soon as I was on the street I felt like I was in Austria. The same small village with restaurants, hotels and skiing lifts as you can find them somewhere in Salzburg or Tyrol. As we still had some time until the concert started, we took the chairlift up to the mountain and enoyed the wonderful view from the top. Then we took a little walk through the town and finally we watched the Matthew Good concert while sitting directly on the skiing slope. It was a wonderful day and even the rainy and cold weather couldn't prevent us from enoying ourselves.

As you might have realized, even tough we went to a mountain, there was still no hiking involved. The real sport followed on Sunday. We took off to explore the local mountains (or rather hills) on foot. Right behind Thompson Rivers University is a small park calles Kenna Cartwright Park, which is basically just a little hill. We went there and after about one hour of hiking uphill we made to a nice picnic place from where we had a wonderful view of the city of Kamloops. It was exhausting as hell but worth it!

Today the university year officially started with the First Year Student Convocation Ceremony. We all met at 8:30 and everyone got a T-Shirt with the color of their program (Tourism was purple, for whatever reason). Then we all sat down at a huge tribune. After this we heard some speeches of important people of the university and then we had to officially swear an oath to be good students. We then were divided in our faculties and went to meet some more people. The day ended with a free BBQ and a lot of booths, all over campus where we met the people from different associations of the university like the Students Union. Basically, all we did was walking around, talking to people and collecting free stuff like candy, pens, notepads, frisbees, water bottles...

I guess this was the end of the funny university life. Tomorrow classes start and the real life begins. Up to now all we did at the campus was having fun and eating free food. I guess it can't be like this forever. =)
Anyways I am very thrilled to find out how hard classes in Canada really are.