Probably. To be honest, I don’t remember anything horrible as far as food was concerned. I stayed in Canada a little more than two month and didn’t starve so I guess there was no problem there .
And the only disappointing things were actually due to my young age. It’s funny, in the past couple of years I’ve wished to go back, almost felt like I needed to go back. For almost 25 years I didn’t make anything of my stay there. It was just something cool I did. Now, I wish I’d realized earlier what a great opportunity I’d had and tried to capitalize on it.
One more memory. The link with the OP is tenuous but it was a funny situation. The family I was staying with had taken me to a reconstructed Native settlement (a very impressive visit by the way but I don’t remember the name of the place). At one point, the daughter looked at me and said half-jokingly: “You bad Europeans who killed all our Indians!” To which I replied: “Hey, your ancestors killed the Indians, not mine. Mine stayed in Europe.” She stopped in her tracks, a bit offended. Her mother walked past her with a huge grin on her face and said: “He’s right, you know.”
I was on a shuttle bus at the Montreal Airport once and a really ignorant-looking, rednecky guy boarded. I involuntarily cringed, wondered what had brought him to Montreal, and waited for him to start acting like a stereotypically “ugly American.” But when he opened his mouth out came a stream of Quebecois French! I almost laughed out loud - I didn’t know there were rednecks like that in Quebec.
The general modernity and North American-ness of Montreal surprised me a bit. The French language is in my mind so inextricably linked to the Old World that it was weird to be looking at American-style skyscrapers and know that they were full of busy little francophone worker bees. I don’t mean this in a condescending way, but it actually struck me as kind of poignant: it was like looking at an alternate history of North America, if the French had predominated on the continent instead of the English. Now the empire that had once ruled everything from Quebec on down to Louisiana was reduced to more or less one province with only two major cities, and English pushing in on all sides. It made me sympathetic to the francophone cause.
Toronto I found to be kind of blah, which surprised me because it has such a good reputation. I did a day of sightseeing (CN Tower, art museum, etc.) then was running low on ideas and asked the guy at my hotel for suggestions. “Hmm,” he said, thinking. “Oh - there’s the shoe museum. It’s shaped like a shoe…” His voice trailed off and he shrugged. That kind of summed up my Toronto experience.
The border guards in Quebec were just as bad. I’ve crossed a lot of borders, but never have I been so aggressively questioned as when I took an Amtrak from New York to Montreal.
(The concept of stores having to close for a whole list of holidays, whether they want to or not, is alien enough. I’m used to shopping being open 363 days a year (or even 364 now that Black Friday is becoming Black Thursday Evening).
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Stores don’t have to close on retail holidays. The purpose of retail holidays is that if a store wants to be open on a holiday, they have to pay a higher rate to their employees for working on a holiday, typically time and a half, or give them a day off during normal working hours.
IIRC, that’s only in Ontario. In BC they use them like a flashing yellow, so for things like traffic signals that turn into 2-way stops at certain hours or pedestrian-triggered crosswalk signals. And of course both of those are completely different from what a flashing green means in Mexico or Europe.
Holy shit! You’re right. I had no idea, and I’ve driven in Vancouver. I would have just plowed on through the intersection if I’d seen a flashing green. And it’s a bloody good thing I didn’t see one! That’s bizarre.
This trip was a bit earlier than that, after it was legal in most of Canada but while there was still some dithering and foot-dragging out west. Civil unions were a thing in much of the US (but gay marriage wasn’t) and many businesses had decided to treat gray and straight couples equally at the corporate level, but this knowledge usually hadn’t filtered down to the local outlets. We’d gotten used to having to explain corporate policy to (usually) friendly but confused clerks, CSRs, etc. at home. It was a shock to pick up our rental car in Toronto, start to explain “Our employer’s agreement with (rental company) says that same-sex couples are also eligible for the couples discount and and cwSpouse should automatically be added as an authorized driver…” only to be informed that yeah, all couples are handled the same way here.
Some workers (federal government and at least some provincial/municipal government) also get Easter Monday, Remembrance Day, and Boxing Day (Dec 26th) as holidays. I was at the library today and there was a notice it would be closed on Good Friday, Easter, and Easter Monday.
But you’re in Ontario, where November 11 isn’t a holiday. It is a holiday in most if the country and I think federal offices are closed in the other provinces on those days?
It’s a holiday for all federal public employees in Ontario…except me. (Well, except my crown corporation which will be privatized by October, and then who knows?)
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