Curling

What sport could be more Canadian than that great game on ice known as curling? Well, maybe hockey, but whatever. For this year's lab winter/holiday social we all went out to a curling club in Toronto for a couple of hours of frictionless hilarity.

I should mention that watching curling during the winter Olympics is one of many fond memories I cherish from Durham. In my fourth year, I would get back from my lab in the evenings and women's curling would be broadcasting on the BBC webpage. Andy would come over and we'd watch a few ends before heading to dinner in the dining hall. The great thing about watching curling is that after 2 minutes of watching, anybody can pick up on the rules and start bantering about strategy and player performance.

So on television, curling looks pretty easy. In reality, it is a sport of patience, concentration, and great skill--none of which I had last week. The hardest part is just moving around on the ice. Ice, as I'm sure you know, is very slippery. To make it easier for participants to move around, they are provided with an extra grippy rubber soul. This would be great if it were a pair of extra grippy rubber souls, but alas, on the other foot you have to wear a really smooth and slippery plastic soul--and it's really slippery. OK, so this is the ideal combination of grip and glide needed for throwing the stones down the ice (see my most unflattering action shot below), but apart from that, it makes it quite tricky to move around the ice. Sure, if you're a seasoned curler you can glide around the ice with one foot as a gondola and the other as the gondolier punting down the ice. But if you're not, well, you can expect to end up with your backside on the ice at some point!

Despite injuries and lack of success at the sport, the afternoon was a fun one, and I'd definitely be up for curling again. My favourite part of the sport was standing at the end as 'skip' and shouting really loudly and enthusiastically to my fellow team mates "hurry hard!"