Friendly Manitoba

Now I know why they call Winnipeg Winter-peg. It's as cold here as it is in Inuvik! What the heck! Though, it was nice waking up this morning with daylight. I heard it is the coldest city in North America with a population over 600 000.
So last night as well as tonight I tagged along with some Winnipeg DFO people for dinner. Both were really nice, it was fun to eat out, theres sort of a lack of restaurants in Inuvik. Today the conference here at the hotel was really good, I learned a bunch and was actually able to pipe up a couple times in the breakout groups and put my student-ish two sense in. The food was good too, lots of fresh fruit and veggies! Oh Oh, and I won a prize! haha we played this game where we had to get into groups and make up a 30 second blurb that we would say to Peter Mansbridge if we were trying to convince him to come and do a story on the Marine Protected Areas in the Beaufort Sea. So my group and I came up with the idea to warp the lyrics of YMCA to be BMPA and had a ball singing in front of all these important DFOers...haha it was fun. I won a travel mug and a $10 gift cirtificate to Tim Hortons. Looks like I'd have to drink a butt load of tea in the airport in order to spend that...naturally there's a lack of Timmy's in Inuvik. Luckily the cirtificate dosen't expire!
Today I was pretty restricted to the hotel, but tomorrow and Thursday I will have a little more leeway to go outside and explore Winnipeg a little bit. On Monday I did a little bit of shopping, but many stores were closed because it was "Louis Riel" day. Some famous Metis convict? I guess it's Manitoba's equivalent of Family day. So yes, hopefully I will be able to explore a little more tomorrow and thursday and report back about Winnipeg! It seems like a pretty standard Canadian city to me. Larger then KW, smaller then Toronto.
One interesting tidbit I heard someone mention in the airport is that the meaning of Winnipeg is win= dirty and nipee= water in Cree. I guess the red river is a dirty one!