The weather outside may be a frightful 45 degrees below zero, but that doesn’t stop this middle-aged Canadian couple from going outside to blow bubbles.
“Just keep blowiin’ those bubbles, hon!” Ted Goossen tells his wife at one point in a thick Canadian accent, shortly before she declares herself ready to go inside.
But don’t worry, she’s not frostbitten. She’s just grumpy because she doesn’t do mornings. Because in Canada, apparently, freezing to a popsicle while standing in your pajamas is no big deal. Not getting to sleep through your alarm? Send for the mounties!
Goossen is a resident of Thompson, Manitoba, a city in the central northern part of the chilly province. If Goossen’s YouTube channel is any indication, he and his wife regularly encounter extreme subzero temperatures—so frequently that they don’t even bother slipping on a coat or gloves when they go outside to blow bubbles. This must be the most Canadian thing we’ve ever seen on film: bubble-blowing at minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit while wearing fur hats and joking about “senior moments.”
“That’s what we do here in Thompson, Manitoba, for entertainment!” Goossen declares after he accidentally douses himself with snow in a hilarious home-science experiment that involves throwing a cup of boiling water into the air. On the YouTube post, Goossen explains that the video, made and uploaded in March 2009, is an attempt to show that bubbles don’t actually freeze and harden in subzero temperatures:
“Now I was told that bubbles would freeze and make a ‘tinkling’ sound at -40C and colder,” Gossen wrote. “Well they don’t unfortunately. They shrink – collapse into themselves leaving a ‘skin’ behind. The cold causes the air inside the bubble to be less dense which causes the collapse.”
Here’s another video where Goossen successfully does the cup-full-of-boiling-water experiment without winding up with a suit full of insta-slush. (His wife, however, remains unimpressed.)
Screengrab via YouTube
