Maple bites
We visited Granville Island today, did lots of window-shopping and took in some street theater (a juggler-slash-escape-artist, with whom Sparky was quite impressed). In the evening, we hit Gastown again, bought some clothes that say "Canada" on them, and I finally had salmon for dinner. Not much else to say about those things, so who wants some Seinfeld-style observations about Canada? Sure you do!
- Canadians should not be permitted to make pizza. We've had pizza twice while we were up here (in an attempt to save time and money), and both times, it was terrible. People, if the dough rises, it's bread, not pizza crust.
- The money is strange. The bills are quite pretty, but the $1 and $2 coins keep confusing us. If I buy something in a store and get $3.88 in change, I'm not expecting a handful of coins. The natives must have extra-reinforced pockets to handle all the change they accumulate.
- Yes, they all really are that polite. I saw quite a few cabs, and not one of them tried to run me down in a crosswalk for crossing on green.
- The mass-transit drivers are so polite, in fact, that they don't seem to expect us to pay. I bought several books of single-use transit passes when we arrived, but we've been on buses, boats, and trains where there was no way of actually using them, even if we'd wanted to. The mass transit all seems to run on the honor system.
- At Whistler, the staff of everywhere we visited seemed to be made up of Australians. I'm not sure what they did with the Canadians, but somebody should look into it.