Ice Skating and Ice Hockey in Nanaimo

Report by Simone R.

Ice Skating in Canada

Nanaimo has two ice arenas. The first one, Nanaimo Ice Center, is super close to the university (just a three minute walk) and the second one, Cliff McNabb Arena, is located in Bowenroad.
You can go ice skating and watch ice hockey games in both of them. The Clippers Arena, the first one I mentioned, offers public skating twice a week. We decided to go on a Thursday, because it is the day where the Nanaimo Clippers youth team has its games. So our plan was to go skating first and then watch a hopefully nice match.

The price for skating and renting the skaters was 8 CAD, so that is totally fair. The icy surface was not that crowded, because they split the surface into two parts; one for playing hockey and one for skating. Hence, we stuck to the skating side and we were quite surprised how good little children can skate! Wow! There you can really see that Canadians skate at every age!
After skating on our own, it was time to get ready for the match. So we changed the skating shoes back to our normal shoes, bought the tickets for 8 CAD each (not too bad) and got some beer, which is not too expensive either.

Watching Ice Hockey with the Nanaimo Clippers

The match was between the Nanaimo Buccaneers, the youth team of the Nanaimo Clippers, and the Westshore Wolves.  After an opening ceremony, where a man sang the Canadian anthem -which was really amazing, because we did not expect this at a youth match- the game started. I did not expect such a powerful game either! We all were fascinated from the quick and kind of aggressive game. It was really fun to watch!
Nanaimo made the first two goals in the first partof the game. In the second, the Wolves came back with two goals. It was very close. However, during the third playtime, the Buccaneers shot another goal! So we all crossed our fingers that it would stay like this! Only five more minutes… A long time for Ice hockey! Two minutes left and bam! another goal. The Buccaneers made it! 4:2 final score! It was a good game and we were glad to have watched it!

Of course it is not that exciting as a Vancouver Canucks game! However, if you watch Nanaimo first, like we did it, you would not be disappointed and it is really good to learn the rules and to get a first impression of Canadian ice hockey!
If you want to watch the Clippers game, you have to go to the other arena in Bowen Street, but the Buccaneers were really good, too! :)