Sirenita

This year for the 4th of July, we decided to leave the country. Therefore we missed all the fireworks and red white and blue shit, and instead of listening to the neighbors blow up their own trashcans again, we were in Vancouver, BC, eating Chinese food. I got us some maple leaf luggage tags, in case we decide to ever leave the country again while Bush is in office - I figure we can practice saying “aboot” and talking about hockey and curling, and then we will be incognito and safe.

So yesterday I was back at work here when one of the secretaries came up to me. She leaned over my desk and asked, “Oh, how was your holiday?” I said, “Great! Mostly because we were in Canada!” She said, “Ohhhhh! Wow, did they have good 4th of July fireworks up there?”

I don’t know why this even surprised me. When we were looking for Vancouver guidebooks, we searched through the foreign travel section at Barnes and Noble for about 15 minutes without finding any books on Canada. Then, finally, with a sinking heart, I went to the USA travel section. And there they were, those Canada books, filed neatly after “California” but before “Connecticut.”

But I take a small amount of glee in the fact that this isn’t just Americans doing this to Canada. Canada is doing this to itself. The papers were entirely filled with breathless reviews of Bill Clinton’s book, the tv was entirely devoted to Britney Spears’ every pimple. And, when it was time for us to go, we told the cab driver “International!” for our flight. However, when we got to the airport, we discovered that flights to America were Domestic. “But it’s a whole other country, see, we thought it would be international,” we said to the foul tempered turbaned cab driver. “Feh,” he said.