WEM and Elk Island

Sunday, August 31, 2014
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
First thing in the morning we went to see the main attraction of Edmonton: West Edmonton Mall, the largest shopping mall in North America! It really is huge and impressive. I'm not going to describe it in too much detail, because it makes me dizzy just thinking about those crazy crowds running around the giant building. Here's a short list of things that the mall contains: over 800 stores and services, waterpark with a huge wave pool, amusement park with roller coasters(all inside the building), show with sea lions, miniature golf, skating rink, a hotel, "theme areas" (such as "Europa Boulevard" and "Chinatown"), several food courts and massive crowds of shoppers.

Tired from the mall, we drove to a completely different place: Elk Island National Park . The park has the densest population of hoofed animals: bison, elk, deer and moose. I mostly wanted to see a bison, but a moose or an elk were quite welcome too. The guy in the visitor centre told me that bison come out to feed during dusk and during the day they mostly hide in the woods, so we went on a hike inside a wooded area first. In the beginning of the hike we saw some people coming back, but none of them encountered any bison. Still, we went ahead for 45 minutes or so and turned back having not found any large animal. On the way back to the parking, we walked through a clearing that we've seen before and there was a large rock that I didn't recall seeing there. Still, it looked pretty much like a normal rock until we went around it a bit and noticed a long tail flicking behind it! It turned out to be a decent-size bison hiding or sleeping in tall grass. It wasn't afraid of us at all, so we stayed for a bit to observe it. The animal got up and started eating grass; it was hard to see its entire body, because it was mostly hidden by the grass . After taking some photos, we moved on.

Later we drove around the park to see if we could find any more animals, but without luck. We saw a large gathering of telescope enthusiasts and one of them even let us look at the sun through his telescope (with a special filter, of course). We did a few more loops through the park and the area where bison come out during dusk (it was getting dark already), but still haven't seen any. Well, one bison is better than none, so we were satisfied enough and drove back to the hotel. Julia wanted to see a certain street with lit-up trees and nice stores, so we made a loop through the city and took another look at that particular area before returning to the hotel.

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