Second day so far and I feel like I am already starting feel like I have mostly caught up on sleep from the long day yesterday.

Since we hadn’t really seen much yet, Senpai Anne took some time this morning to show us around Penticton so we would be able to slowly find our way around.

First stop today was to Budget, to hire a car. This was a nerve-racking experience for the both us since we are both used to driving on the left hand side of the road, but now everything is the opposite. But after starting to get our head around things, we decided to go and check out the tournament venue.

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After taking some time to check the tournament venue out, we went down to the local mall, Cherry Lane. Here we found some food for lunch and also a quick new treat to try. Whilst we were out, we also found a store called Coles just like the one back home, but this one wasn’t a grocery store, it was a book shop!

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Feeling hungry at this point, we headed home to get into our lunch and after that I had a small-ish nap. Feeling refreshed from my nap, we had some dinner and Senpai Anne took us for a short evening walk along the beach and then back home to meet some chickens with a pair of funky crocks hahaha.

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At this point it was already night time and the sun was still out! This was really different for us, as we are used to the sun setting much earlier back home. Here is a picture of the sun starting to set at almost 9pm.

The air started to cool down, so we decided to head inside for bed. But before we settled down for the night, we had to try this cool machine.

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Although, we didn’t get any training in today, there will definitely be some waiting for the rest of the week starting tomorrow morning!

Day one of the trip was amazing! The first flight to Vancouver was surprisingly good apart from the having to sit there for 13 and a half hours and the bad plane food, it wasn’t all that bad.

On the plane I did try to get some sleep, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to, so I ended up watching a total of 7 movies before we finally landed.

Although there wasn’t much to do on the flight, I did find it really cool how we landed a couple hours before we left.

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After landing in Vancouver for around a 10 hour stop over, despite the lack of sleep, we managed to tour around for the day.

For the day, we enjoyed a 12-13km walk around Stanley Park. As it was a Sunday, only few shops were open, so the city wasn’t too busy and there were light showers going on all day which was probably also helping with the fact that it was fairly quiet all day. Although the walk felt like it went on forever, it was also a beautiful walk whilst also learning about some of the history. We didn’t finish the whole track, but on the way back we treated ourselves to some lunch at Subway.

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After this, we headed back to the airport where we still had around 4 hours til our 2nd flight into Penticton. In this time we had a small wander around the airport and then we just sat down and waited. In one of the stores when we were wandering around, I found Maltesers! That’s some pretty exciting news.

When we were waiting for the flight, I was trying really hard to stay awake, even though I hadn’t slept in over 24 hours at this point… I ended up just sleeping. I also ended up sleeping through the whole flight.

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Finally after two flights, we have made all the way from Brisbane to Penticton! Now for the next 2 weeks before the rest of the team makes it here, we will be staying with Senpai Anne and her husband Wayne with lots of adventures to come!

Congratulations to Sam Phillips for being chosen as this year’s winner of the Canada training scholarship. The training will be hosted by Taneda Sensei in Kelowna and Penticton, British Columbia, host of this year’s Soke Cup. Sam will be accompanied by Sensei Martin and will be joining the rest of the Soke Cup squad for the tournament in late July.