The winters here in Edmonton can be very long and cold with the exception of this year for some inexplicable reason. Thankfully, the city of Edmonton has made a valiant effort towards providing its citizens with a winter style festival located downtown next to city hall. They named it Metropolis Edmonton. Here is a link to a video of the Edmonton Metropolis Winter Festival 2012 A venue comprising of six self contained structures assembled with scaffolding and sheathed in tight white shrink wrap. The look is nice enough from the outside with clean shinny surfaces and ok lines. I've only seen the structures during the daytime but at night they are lit up with tons of color (judging from the images off the net). The venues have a particular purpose. The beer tent is self explanatory, the children's pavilion has a built in two story slide with multiple stations at ground level with activities to keep the young ones busy. The food tent provides at least 12 vendors of variety. The one vendor selling the butter chicken was extremely busy and for good reason. Although, I was very eager to get my hands on a Funky Pickle Pizza, but alas, the vendor was vacant. And of course the main tent which houses the main attractions. Yeah, if you do the math, that comes to four and I mentioned six. I have no idea where the other two are. I read on the website that there are six.

On our first trip to the Metropolis we watched the city's Chinese community put on a show for the chinese new year. Two dragon's danced the stage and ground while drummers pounded out the beat! Very nice. On our second trip we had decided to take in the Firefly Theatre performance titled Sky Life! Two shows, one at 4 and the second at 8. Because of our young one we opted for the 4pm show. We arrive at 4:01 only to find out that the event was full! Wow! I was looking forward to the high flying CIRQUE DU SOLEIL acrobatics and now this big let down. Discourage, I took our little one to the children's pavilion but my wife had a better idea. She waited outside until someone left and then convinced the doorkeeper to take their place! It worked! We got in and what a show! The performers used almost every inch of floor, stage and air to put on the Show. The crowd of spectators had to be constantly on their toes as the performers moved all around on their stilts and swung from ropes high above! Definitely a show to see when they put on a show next time!