Wednesday, February 06, 2008

The Madison Winter Festival

We went to the Madison Winter Festival last Sunday (February the 2nd). And boy was it fun!!

The MWF is held every year and consists of ski races, Nordic walking, snow tubing, ice sculptures and great fun!! It is held in downtown Madison, outside of the Capitol building. They had dumped tons of snow down there to build a ski track! We went on day 1 of the festival – it just lasts two days.

We watched a few races, ate delicious American style pizza (pizza on a thin base, unlike how you get it in India) and nearly froze our feet!! After all the outdoorsy stuff, we hopped in to great coffee place near the church. It was warm and homely and full of students from the University, studying or doing assignments or surfing the web or just catching up! We spent nearly an hour there, warming ourselves before we headed out once more into the sub zeros!

It was late, the sun had gone down and we had missed the kite flying competition of frozen Lake Mendota. But we still had some fun in store! We drove down to Lake Monona and took a jaunty walk across its frozen surface! Twelve inches of think ice layered the surface of the snow, but if dug your foot into the powdery snow on the surface till you reached the sheer ice beneath, you could see the lapping water underneath – remember what we studied in school about the anomalous expansion of water? No? Google it dummy!

We walked and played and freaked me out by jumping on the surface and willing it to break – yeah that was part of the activity! We met some really drunk guys who were sitting around fishing! That’s right, fishing! They’d dug these round holes at intermittent distances and put in a line with a yellow flag on the top. According to one of the guys who gave us a complete lowdown on how the whole thing works, once a fish gets hooked (pun unintended I assure you), the screw-wound reel starts to rotate and the yellow flag stands erect ( it’s parallel to the ground when you send the reel in) and that’s how you know you’ve got a catch. So then you reel it in like a normal fishing line. After more playing in the snow and walking around, we made it back to terra firma, much to my relief! And we drove back home!

And that was the next brilliant day after the previous weekend when we went to a ski resort!!

4 comments:

Adi said...

How did you manage to miss Superbowl?

Ashwin Alexander said...

A Madison-related post at last! :)

Irritating specimen said...

interesting..guess pizza on thin base is more of italian style :)

MechaniGal said...

You're right it is... but somehow I've always associated the thin base pizza ( with base that looks like the Salvadore Dali painting) with FRIENDS... you know the episode where they're all singing the In The Jungle song and eating pizza at Ross's aptt?
BTW, welcome to my blog and thanks for leaving a comment :)

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