Canada

Much like our cruise last year on our most recent cruise Amber and I got asked many questions about Canada.  And with the snowfall over the weekend and the freezing temperatures today I thought I may be appropriate to explore a few things that make Canadians, Canadian.

I know that most of the readers of the blog are Canadian so feel free to add things in your comments please!

- Our Money

Canadian money is fun and colourful, currently it's worth almost as much as the U.S. Dollar but we should get points for design I think.  Pictures make things better, and we have lots of cool pictures on our money, also the colours make it easy to see if you are rich or not just by looking in your wallet.  When I stayed in the US for a summer I always thought I was loaded because my wallet would be so fat, unfortunately it was usually with $1's   Our $1 are coins, so are our $2!

- Food
Most folks figure the Canada is pretty much like America North.  Turns out it really isn't.  Food is actually a fairly large separator for us.  Like most of the world we have plenty in common, when it comes to both homemade and restaurant food.  We do have a few notable exceptions and exports.

Beavertails - I unfortunately have never actually had a beavertail :(  they do not sell them nearby, but they sounds and look delicious.  It is not actually a beavertail of course, but pastry, coated in sugar.  Find Details here!

It's probably for the best they don't sell them in Peterborough or else I may not have lost all the weight I did.


Poutine - Fries, covered in cheese curd (some places use mozzarella cheese bits) and then doused in beef gravy.  Clearly this concoction is terrible for you but that is what makes it so delicious.   It's a creation that comes from Quebec and if you get the chance to try it don't pass it up.

Chip trucks - it's come to my attention in the conversations I have had with Americans that the notion of a "chip truck" is foreign to them as well.  Almost without fail the best fries in the area (unless you live in a major urban center) are from a chip truck.  In Peterborough from the people I talk to the Hippie Chippie at Beavermead park is the best.  But I love the fries at Brown Eyed Susan's in Bailieboro too.  Basically a chip truck is some sort of converted old mini-bus, trailer or van that has had fryers installed that specializes in one thing:  Fries.






- Milk in a Bag
Yes you read that right.  Back when I was about 18/19 I had a picture of me holding milk in a bag on my computer as a quirky way of showing myself to Americans on ICQ and as a good conversation starter.  "here's my pic"  "what are you holding?"  "milk in a bag!" "what?!?!"  Digging up pictures and such for this little blog I have discovered that milk in a bag pretty much only exists in Ontario and eastward (Quebec and the Maritimes) and out west they have milk in jugs and cartons. We can get milk in jugs in Ontario too, but typically you buy it in bags.  You buy a big bag that hold 4 Litres and within that bag are 3 smaller bags that you then place in a holder so that you can pour it out.

-We say "Eh"
Canadians tend to do this more than we think, but not as much as the rest of the world seems to think we do.  Eh is a funny little word that we typically add to the end of questions "It's cold out eh?"  Or to make a statement into a question "We're going for lunch, eh?"  or as an affirmative "That's awesome eh!"  Eh can also be it's own sentence meaning  "Did you hear me or what?"  For instance you ask someone a question..  "Do you want a drink while I'm in the kitchen?" and you wait and get no response, so you go "Eh?!" to try to get an answer.  So in some cases it functions like "right" that a lot of people use "I know right?"  and as "huh?"  That's cool huh?"  We just put it all into one word.

-Hockey
To some Americans it's "Ice Hockey"  for us it's just hockey.  Because all Other types of hockey get the prefix (field, ball, roller...)  Most Canadians love it, an it seems that most Americans are hardly aware of it's awesomeness, except during the Olympics if they happen to win.  Like Bowling draws higher ratings in the US than Hockey, which seems odd to me because it has most things that Americans seem to love otherwise.  High speed, Big hits, Fights.  Maybe it's because it's played on ice?

-An ability to drive in the snow


Over the weekend where I live we got about 1/2 a foot of snow, in March 2008 we got this much snow
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It was enough that the snow was higher than my front porch, so over a foot at least.  Now this is a large, all at once snowfall, but besides having to shovel out the driveway I drove through streets with that much snow to get to the store to buy Smash Bros for Wii (awesome).  All the stores were open, even though it was Sunday.  Life just was delayed for people by about 30 minutes because it took  a while to get where you were going.

Miscellaneous items
We don't have yoo-hoo (thank god!)
Our Ice Tea is sweet to begin with
For our high school sports it's mostly about 20 people that show up and they know the players somehow
In order to compete in trivia games we have to know lots of American things