Now, this week’s episode is going to be a little bit shorter than usual because, as maybe some of you know, I’m currently on the road. I’m back home in Canada right now. And because of that, I don’t have access to my usual podcast studio, and my equipment, and my gear.

I actually wanted to bring a microphone with me, but I just didn’t have room in my luggage for it. Recording equipment has shrunk substantially over the years.

If you go back and look at a recording studio from the 1960s, for example, they were huge, and they took up big, massive rooms. But the equipment has shrunk so much that now it’s possible to carry around a recording studio with you in a backpack.

But unfortunately, I had so many gifts, and presents, and things to bring back with me on this trip that I just didn’t have room for it in my luggage. So, I’m recording this episode right now just on my phone, but I think it will be good enough for this quick update.

And as always, we’re going to make a free transcript to accompany this episode, you’ll be able to get that on our website Culips.com or by following the link in the description, and I highly recommend following along with the transcript as you study with this episode today.

As I was saying, my wife and I are in Canada right now. We’ve been here for just over a week, we started our trip in Vancouver, and we stayed there for three days before coming to Kelowna, which is my hometown.

Now Vancouver was awesome. It was a long flight, but it wasn’t too bad. The whole flight was around nine hours long, and we landed in the morning, and we hit the ground running from the moment we arrived.

To hit the ground running is an idiomatic expression that means to start doing something with a lot of energy and enthusiasm.

So, even though we were tired after that long flight from Seoul, we hit the ground running as soon as we arrived and we tried to make the best use of our time in Vancouver right from the moment that we got there.

My sister met us at the airport and then drove us to our hotel and we checked into the hotel quickly and then went out to explore downtown Vancouver with my little sister, she’s five years younger than me.

We ate some lunch together and we went to a very famous park in Vancouver called Stanley Park, and we walked around the Seawall. Now usually the weather in Vancouver in January is bleak.

It’s gray, it’s rainy, and although the temperature doesn’t fall below zero too often, it always feels really cold and damp. But on our first day in Vancouver, the weather was awesome. It was sunny, it wasn’t too cold at all.

So, we really tried to make the most of that nice weather by doing outdoorsy stuff, like walking around the Seawall on that day. And if you’re not familiar with Vancouver, the Seawall is a 22 and a half kilometer long path that encircles a lot of the downtown peninsula.

And also that famous park that I mentioned, Stanley Park. The Seawall is a popular spot for locals and tourists, and it offers fantastic stunning views of the ocean and the surrounding mountains and the city skyline. It’s also a great place to exercise.

Of course, you can walk around the Seawall, but there’s also a vehicle lane, if I can call it that? Where you can ride a bike, or rollerblade or skateboard. Of course, we didn’t walk around the whole Seawall because like I said, it’s over 22 kilometers long.

But we did have a nice walk and we spent a few hours outside exploring around the city. And we also caught a very gorgeous sunset and some beautiful views of the sunlight reflecting off the snow-covered mountains in the distance. It was awesome.

But then, as soon as the sun set we had to dash to the other side of the downtown peninsula, because we had plans to go and see my favorite ice hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks and they were playing a game against the Colorado Avalanche.

The Canucks are a terrible team this year. They’re one of the worst teams in the NHL. The NHL is what we call North America’s professional hockey league. N, National. H, Hockey. L, League. The NHL. The Colorado Avalanche were last season’s champions.

So like I expected, the Canucks were badly outplayed and ended up losing the game, unfortunately. But even though they lost, the experience of watching the game in person was awesome.

And it was really fun and cool to show my wife what it’s like to watch a hockey game in Canada, she was able to see Canadians’ passion for the game firsthand. So then, after the game, we were pretty exhausted.

It was around 10pm at night, and we had been traveling and doing things all day on top of our long flight from Korea to Vancouver. So, we just went back to the hotel and crashed. We spent the next two days exploring the city some more.

And we saw a lot of great things and ate a lot of delicious food, as you can imagine. One of the things my wife has been enjoying the most is actually visiting grocery stores, which is a little bit surprising to me.

If I had known that the most interesting place for her to visit was grocery stores, then I could have saved a lot of time planning our trip, but I guess there are just a lot of differences between the food that sold at Korean supermarkets and the food that sold at Canadian supermarkets.

One of the biggest differences is selection, and that’s been interesting for her especially because my wife loves eating fruit. So, she was really excited to try all the different kinds of fruit that are sold in Canada, especially the ones that are not sold in Korea.

So, for example, when you go to a normal supermarket in Korea, there are apples, right? Of course they sell apples, but there are maybe just one or two kinds of apples, and there’s no information about them.

When you look at the sign or the price tag, it will just say “apples” and tell you the price. But here in Canada, there are tons of different varieties and even I was a little bit shocked myself to see how many different kinds there were, I forgot about that.

So, there are many varieties of apples for sale, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Royal Gala, Pink Lady, Granny Smith, Ambrosia, McIntosh, Spartan, Jonagold. I can’t even remember how many there are. Those are just a few off the top of my head.

So, there are many, many different types of apples here. And of course, my wife wanted to try them all. So, we bought a couple of each kind of apple and we’ve been doing lots of taste testing. It’s been very delicious.

Also, we’ve been eating many pears, but there isn’t as much selection when it comes to pears. We’ve been eating berries, a lot of berries. Now it kind of seems weird to eat so much fruit in the winter. But it’s been a fun and a delicious culinary experience.

And I think we’re going to have to visit Canada again in the summer next time when we can eat fresher fruit. Anyway, we’re back in Kelowna, right now my hometown, and we’re staying at my parents’ house, my parents’ place.

The weather hasn’t been too great here, so we’ve been mostly just chilling and relaxing and doing a lot of indoor activities. We went shopping. And of course, we have been watching ice hockey on TV in the evening.

It’s kind of funny, I joked with my wife about when I first moved to Korea and the way that I fell in love with Korean food was to challenge myself to try every dish and every kind of food 10 times. Before I moved to Korea, I was a little bit of a picky eater.

But now, I love almost all foods from all sorts of cuisines from around the world. But back then, when I first moved to Korea, I was a picky eater and I found some Korean food to be strange and not that appetizing, but I made a point to keep eating food that I found weird or strange.

And I noticed that after trying something for about 10 times, then I learned to love it. And now I absolutely love Korean food, and to be honest, I miss it now that I’m here in Canada.

But anyways, I was joking with my wife that if she does the same thing with hockey, if she watches 10 hockey games, then she’ll end up falling in love with the sport just like I ended up falling in love with Korean food.

And I think we’ve watched three games together now, and I can’t say that she’s a huge fan of the sport yet, but maybe after another seven games she will be. We’ll see if we can pack in seven games before we have to go back.

So Kelowna has been good with lots of time spent visiting family, and showing my wife around the city and where I grew up. Speaking of family, we’re supposed to meet my parents, and my little sister, and my younger brother in just a few moments, and we’re going to have lunch together.

So I’m going to take off now, there will be no special vocabulary lesson for today. But guys, don’t worry if you’re looking for more study material, remember our website Culips.com.

We have hundreds of lessons there for you to learn with, including our most recent Chatterbox episode, which is about the metaverse. The Culips team and I put a lot of work into creating that episode, so I’d love it if you could give it a listen.

And I think you will find it very interesting and helpful for taking you at least just one more step closer to reaching your English fluency goals.

I think for next week, the bonus episode will be similar to this week’s because I’m still going to be away from home, and I’ll only have access to my phone here for creating the podcast.

But the following week after that, I will be back in Korea. I’ll be back in my studio, I’ll have my mic, I’ll have my computer and I’ll be able to return to regular-scheduled programming. So anyways, that will be it for now.

Take care everyone and I’ll talk to you again soon. Bye!