Mar. 3: O Canada

My first up-close-and-personal experience with Canadians was in college. Although many of them were lovely human beings—in fact, most of them were—they transformed into total a-holes at the university’s USA vs. Canada hockey game every year.

Attending these games affected my views on Canada much more than it should have. I began to see my Canadian classmates as pompous blowhards who needed to cross back over that border and attend one of their own schools. With just a few exceptions, they were not nice people.

Oh, who am I kidding? They were perfectly nice people. They were just sorta backward. For instance, their beloved flag only had two colors. TWO! What is up with that? Their coins were worthless here but they jammed them in the vending machines anyway. And their paper money was way prettier than ours and that was soooo not fair.

You can see why I held such strong prejudices now, huh? Wait, it gets worse.

I worked with a guy who had just moved here from Canada, and the first time we ordered pizza together he said he preferred pineapple and ham for toppings. I said, “Ham? No one here puts ham on their pizza!” and I laughed and laughed and laughed. (See what I mean? Backward.) I patiently explained that a Hawaiian pizza has pineapple and Canadian bacon, but no ham. He explained back, loudly, that what I called “Canadian bacon” was ham and I was wrong and so was every other person who called it that and he would never, ever conform, ever.

See? They’re jerks!

Oh, who am I kidding? He was (is) a good guy, even though on Valentine’s Day, when he had a crush on my roommate, he brought her a bouquet of red roses and just so I wouldn’t feel left out he brought me a gift too, which was a gift-wrapped six-pack of cherry Coke.

It’s easy to mock a country that makes an annoyance like Céline Dion a national hero. But it’s important to conveniently forget, then, that we live in a country in which there are entirely too many fans of NASCAR and Rush Limbaugh.

Alright, so I finally visited Canada for myself last year after living five hours south of the border for most of my life. And I have to say that of all the foreign countries I’ve visited (that would be an embarrassingly low number of ten or so), it was by far the friendliest and cleanest of them all. Even with the long wait to cross in and out of the country and their excessive use of the letter u in words where no u is needed, it surprised me how much I loved being there. Our kids’ most vivid memory of Canada is that they can drink Mountain Dew there. To them, that means “Canada has everything!”

For a humourous article about another one of their national “treasures,” read today’s cracked.com article, William Shatner to run Canada in to the ground.

Lastly, I extend an olive branch to my Canadian friends if I ever shunned you in school. You are all lovely people. Really. I was immature and knew not of what I spoke, eh?

You were wicked at those hockey games though…