Before you read this article and freak out over the amount of snow you're about to see, I want to clarify that I took these pictures last March. Moose Jaw had a lot more snow than they do at the time of publishing this. I just postponed the article to prevent you from any winter PTSD during the summer months.

The Moose Jaw Wild Animal Park opened in 1929 as a 540-acre zoo. It contained over 200 types of animals from across Canada and the northwestern United States. For almost eighty years the zoo was in operation, educating visitors on different animals and environmental preservation. It started with bison, bears and wolves, and eventually expanded to include more exotic animals such as lions. It was difficult to get numbers, but it had an average attendance of almost a million people per year.

All this ended in 1995 when the zoo failed to gain the necessary liability insurance. On September 28, 1995, the Environment and Resource Management shut down the zoo. In 1997 the zoo's property was sold to the City of Moose Jaw for $1, with the provincial government providing a $50,000 grant to restore the area.

People, places and things often change names. Sometimes this is because of a war, like Kitchener (Berlin), Ontario or Leader (Prussia), Saskatchewan, but it can also happen during peacetime too.

When this happens, it is usually associated with a societal change. Today, it is usually to embrace multiculturalism and to dissolve racial barriers. At least, this is the reasoning behind the name change of the Edmonton Football Team (Edmonton Eskimos) and the Washington Football Team (Washington Redskins).

(And, sometimes it's because things just didn't age well, like Tisdale's "Land of rape and honey".)

When I first started my journal entries of Europe, I started a halfhearted attempt at writing travel tips. I think I got about one or two in before before I forgot about it. Having time to reflect on that trip, and the many more since then, I have compiled the following list as advice for fellow travelers:

This may seem a little strange, but these can actually be very helpful. Imagine this: you're halfway across the world, alone, and you don't speak the language. You've just had a long day shopping, eating and exploring and now, exhausted, you somehow managed to hail a cab. But the taxi driver doesn't speak English, and you don't speak their language. You can't describe your hotel, and you probably don't remember the name of it. What do you do? You hand them the hotel's business card. Not only can the taxi driver see what your hotel is called, but he can see the address of it.

In many parts of the world, restaurants advertise their food outside, either on posters or in display cases. Some of it might even look appetizing! But how do you tell the people inside that you want the strange food item you saw outside? Simple. You take out your camera, take a picture of it, and when you go to take your order you show them the picture. They probably already know you're a foreigner, and it's probably best you don't try to explain what you want to eat it to them (because that's painful for all parties involved). If you have a picture of the item, they know exactly what you want, and you'll get exactly what you ordered... which brings us to our next point: