1960 Canadia Took 2

On my recent trip to Canadia I was surprised by a few things. Just minor stuff that reminds you you're indeed in a foreign country, even though the language is pretty much the same.
By pretty much I mean not exactly. I actually heard someone say tooks. Spelled t-u-q-u-e-. Tooks are what we call beanies or knit caps. I hadn't heard the word since the Great White North show with Bob and Doug McKenzie. And never in casual conversation.
Took a little getting used to.
Then there were the food choices. Like the breakfast jam caddy thing at restaurants. The ones down here have about 4 types of jams. Up there they also had little square tubs of honey or, get this, peanut butter. Peanut butter on raisin toast. My favorite new Canadian treat.
And HP sauce. Which tastes like Worcestershire sauce but is thick as Heinz 57. Good on eggs. But not good when accidentally smeared on peanut butter raisin toast.
Then there's the money. Canadian money has always been a little funny. Highly-colored bills and strange change. The one-dollar coin is called the loony, since it has a picture of a loon on it. They also have a two-dollar coin, with a little copper part embedded in the nickel part. I thought it was some sort of medallion they mistakenly gave me.
And they gave me a lot of change. I'll never feel bad about a thick fold of one-dollar bills again. My pockets were bulging with change in Canada. Every time I paid with a 20-dollar bill I'd get back a giant handful of coins.
I'm guessing they have a powerful pants pocket repair union lobby in Canada. I sure got taken to the tailor.
Or was that took?
America, ya gotta love it.

1959 Colours of Canadia

I was in Canada recently and it was awesome with a capital... eh? It's always nice to have a light cross-cultural experience. Canadians are wonderful people to share it with and Canadia is a nice place to go.
But it's definitely a different culture. In little ways. It's not just that they say proe-ject for prah-ject, and proe-gress for prah-gress. Or a-boat instead of about. It's that they say certain things at all.
Like I was sitting in a breakfast place and these two elderly ladies came in who had just been out for their morning walk. The waitress asked how they were. One of the ladies said, "We're just fine, but it's a little chilly out this morning."
The other said, "Yes… it's 2!!"
Which, in fact, it was, by the Celsius scale. But it sounded so odd to hear it that way. Around here we are comfortable saying, "It's 45" or "It's 27" without adding the word "degrees." But 2 seems to need that added emphasis. Just saying "it's 2" is incomplete somehow.
Another minor thing I noticed was the way they are so honest with products. Or at least their color. Maybe it's because they spell colour with a U.
At that same breakfast, when it came time for my waitress to take my order and ask about my selection of toast she listed the choices thusly: "Would you like rye, raisin, white, or brown?"
Brown presumably being what we call wheat. But more honest since what we call wheat is often caramel-colored white.
Then, when I went through the coffee condiments on the table, there was one packet that said, "coffee whitener". Not creamer, not powdered non-dairy creamer. But whitener.
For when you just want your coffee to look lighter.
Eh?
America, ya gotta love it.

1958 Hodgepodge Lodge

I notice new buildings going up. And, as I suppose I'm meant to, I notice the architecture. Architects have a couple of goals in mind. One is to build a building that meets certain values of functionality, like "LEED standards" which champion energy efficiency. The other thing architects want is for people to take notice of the esthetics of their buildings.
The art of architecture, as it were.
But, like most people, they follow trends. Creativity is nice but plagiarism is quicker, as they say. That must be why I see so much of what I'm seeing today. Back in the late eighties, when for no apparent reason everything macaroni-like was suddenly called pasta, the big architecture fad was canopies, those tent-like overhangs that were snapped on new buildings and used to update old.
The recent tendency at first seemed to be structures not unlike 60s airport terminals, but then today's building fashion frenzy became any jumbles of mixed materials on the exterior. Hodgepodge Lodge. Some brink and some stone. Some horizontal lap siding, in two or three different widths. Some board and batten perhaps.
Then there'll be something that looks like corrugated aluminum sheets. But it won't actually be colored aluminum, it will have some solid earth tone. The net artistic intent of all this materials mishmash appears to be contemporary visual variety.
Or, as I like to call it, Trailer Trash Modern.
"I got your corrugated mobile home siding here on my pop-out. Then there's the brick for my homemade smoker. Some lap boards on my shed with the blue tarp on the roof. Then I got some Krylon painted plywood here to fix that hole Jim-Bob blew out of the bedroom when he was cooking up a batch of meth.
“Purty ain't it?"
America, ya gotta love it.