Day 34 - Exploring Edmonton

Hello friends, so after a pretty chill day in Edmonton yesterday, my productivity got amplified to 100% today with all the things that I did. So I got up and left the house to get an oil change, and then I went to pick up an old conference friend of mine, Venedict Tamondong, who took me all across Edmonton. The first thing we did was visit the West Edmonton Mall (WestEd), which is the largest mall in North America! As we walked in, I was in amazement of just how huge it really was, and at the number of things that the mall has. We walked down BRBN St, saw the Santa Maria (a pirate ship in the middle of the mall), walked through Europa Boulevard, saw a sea lion show, explored Galaxy Land (an indoor amusement park in the mall), walked around the Ice Palace (a huge indoor ice rink in the mall), and we visited the World Waterpark (more on that later). We then went to grab lunch at Famoso, which is honestly one of my favourite restaurants, and I only learned today that it started in Edmonton!

Venedict wanted to show me a bit more of what Edmonton had to offer, so we drove to the Alberta Legislature Building, which is beautiful on the outside and even more so on the inside. There was a pretty cool fountain and pool in the courtyard in front of it, which was pretty cool as well. We took a quick walk through the Constable Ezio Faraone Park, which had a beautiful view of the River Valley. One cool observation I made was that by seeing the River Valley, I have been to both the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers. We then made our way to the Muttart Conservatory, which is a botanical garden close to DT Edmonton, but the funny thing with that is that we spent about an hour getting there because of the amount of construction and endless detours (at least I got to see a lot of downtown though). When we got there, it was such a pleasant surprise and one of the highlights of my day. There were some absolutely beautiful exhibits, and they have a "Feature" exhibit that they change every month and a half. The Feature exhibit this time around was called "Letters from Europe" and has some artistic elements from all parts of Europe. Each exhibit is inside of a giant glass pyramid, so the lighting was impeccable and added a lot to our tour. There was a guy there that told us about the different flowers, with one of the cool things being that the colours of the flowers change depending on acidity of the soil. We then drove over to Hawrelak Park, but it started raining quite heavily so we never actually left the car, but it was pretty from what I saw of it.

After finishing up everything that we had planned for the day, we drove back to WestEd and decided to spend the next 3 hours in the World Waterpark. I hadn't been in a waterpark in years, so it felt very nostalgic being in there. We stayed in the wave pool for a good chunk of time, and we managed to get on almost every waterslide while we were there. 3 hours is a long time to spend in a waterpark, but we definitely made the most of it and had such a great time. We then grabbed dinner at the mall, and drove over to the Sutton Place Hotel in DT Edmonton to meet up with Vanessa Raponi, who's going to be joining me from this point onward on my trip. We hung out with her and a few Engineers from Nova Scotia, Denise Pothier and Rosalie Hanlon, and had some really great discussions (which were simultaneously very entertaining). We then dropped Venedict home, grabbed some food, and headed back to the hotel. Tomorrow we make our way to the beautiful province of British Columbia, and I could not be more excited!

Exploring Edmonton: www.instagram.com/p/Bjjdp3HFEBj