  So, there we were, on the way back from the 'english' pub called 'the pump and tap' (i use the term 'english' VERY loosly! ) and there over the hills are the northern lights!!! For those of you that don't know the 'Northern lights' (AKA 'Aurora Borealis') is where the sun gives off high-energy charged particles (also called ions) that travel out into space at speeds of 300 to 1200 kilometres per second.
A cloud of such particles is called a plasma. The stream of plasma coming from the sun is known as the solar wind. As the solar wind interacts with the edge of the earth's magnetic field, some of the particles are trapped by it and they follow the lines of magnetic force down into the ionosphere, the section of the earth's atmosphere that extends from about 60 to 600 kilometres above the earth's surface. When the particles collide with the gases in the ionosphere they start to glow, producing the spectacle that we know as the auroras, northern and southern.
The array of colours consists of red, green, blue and violet. anyway, there we were, looking up at this, pissed, and a cop car pulls up...now just so u know, Banff is the sort of place that has it's own paper that, every week, has a number in the paper of how many people spent the night in the local prison for being 'intoxicated' in the street...so there i was, about to become another statistic, and one of the other lads decided that it would be a good idea to approach the cop car and explain that we were English and that we'd never seen them before.
as he approached the cop car the brightest light in the world switched on from the top of the car and this deap canadian voice from behind the light said 'step away from the car' suddenly i had visions of them jumping out, shotguns in hand, and going all code 4 on us.
(for those of you that don't know, code 4 is something that is said by american cops...i have no idea what it means! )...but they didn't, it all got resolved and we went home to bed. yesterday i went boarding at sunshine for the first day of their season! it was quite a good day...although i'm still finding it difficult to remember how to board! but i've got plenty of time to remember! anyway, i still have no job, but i've just been informed that some lifty has put his knee out so i'm about to go and try and get his job!!
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