These last 10 days I've had the inestimable pleasure of entertaining a friend from home, one Dr Alice Ferrebe of Liverpool John Moores University. It was so much fun and now that she's gone it all seems a little flat; back to work tomorrow but then it's a long weekend so the holidays aren't over quite yet. Yay!

I used Alice's visit to do some local stuff I hadn't yet had a chance to do: a trip to the Alberta badlands near Drumheller and then a camping trip to Lake O'Hara in Yoho National Park. I'll try and post bits about each trip but the photos are up on Flickr already.

Amidst all this I even managed to appear on local TV! Somehow my run in with my new friends on the far right had found it's way to the news room. On the eve of an anti-racism event in Calgary Global News got in touch and wanted to do an interview. When Dr News comes knocking on the door of course I let him in. So last Friday Alice and I headed down to where the incident happened to meet the reporter. We did a quick interview and talked about what happened and then they wanted to film a kind of low-budget reconstruction. At this point my friendly landlord happened to be walking by and stopped to say hello. He was soon roped in as a nazi volunteer! His job was to stand there with a leaflet whilst I walked past and gave him a dirty look. Now without actually being black it would be hard for my landlord to look any less like a fascist on a recruiting drive even when filmed from behind. In the end that footage was (thankfully) left on the cutting room floor and they made do with pictures of me just walking and giving a dirty look into space, sitting there reading my book and then getting up to say my piece. Watching it on the evening news that evening I just couldn't get past quite how English I sounded!

The other important discovery I made on holiday was my hypothesis that a significant part of the human brain is given over to worrying about your trousers getting wet. So when you purchase MEC Gore-Tex overtrousers (for less than $100!) that part of your brain can relax and with the extra bandwidth anything is possible. More on that story later...