Welcome to Calgary

Today marked the beginning of our first unbooked week ever. That means no kids for seven whole days -- ok, there will be kids somewhere but they're someone else will be in charge of them and their theatre education.

We had a lazy morning in Strathmore, waiting up until the very last second to check out because well, why wouldn't we?

We arrived at our hostel in Calgary at around 12. We are staying at Wicked Hostel on Macleod Trail SE because it was the only hostel that showed up in our Google search and it was cheap. This is the sixth hostel I've stayed at, it's Mandy's first. I'm a big fan of hostels, so I was amped.

Just from checking in, this place is interesting. We're staying in an all girls' dorm with six other girls but there are boys all over this place. No complaints, just an observation.

Pretty much immediately after checking in, we said goodbye to our little red truck and were on the move (by the way the only thing stranger than parking our moving children's theatre billboard outside of a party hostel is when I stayed at a hostel with a nun).

Earlier this week, I saw that the Chinese Cultural Centre was going to have a carnival for the Chinese New Year this weekend and that was our first destination. Actually, it was our second because we stopped to get lunch before we went in (and by that, I mean that we walked all the way to the Cultural Centre before deciding that we wanted to get lunch first). Around the same time I heard about the carnival, I found this list on Buzzfeed -- http://www.buzzfeed.com/tanyachen/delicious-cheap-eats-in-canada#.ajrD8Y0ye -- and we like cheap things and we need to eat, so we made a date with #11 Thi Thi Vietnamese Submarine. We both had the veggie sub and an order of vegetarian spring rolls and not only was it cheap, it was delicious.

Post-lunch, we went back to the Cultural Centre for some celebrating. Crowded, but beautifully decorated the highlight for Mandy was the free ten-minute massage (which wasn't even Chinese). I skipped on that one because I might be trying lots of new things on this trip, but I'm still not ok with strangers touching me.

After that, we decided to go to the Calgary Tower since the day was still young and we didn't have any other plans. The tower is 626ft tall and we went for the free audio tour to get our money's worth.

Brilliant marketing right there

One of the craziest things about the Tower was the plexi-glass floor. It was just a small portion but it was still freaky!

And now we're back at the hostel, chilling in the common area, looking up stuff we can do the rest of the week (local theatre is looking like a very good option!).

It's going to be a good week.