Friday, August 21, 2009

Strangers in a strange land

 

But we’re adjusting.  We stopped and changed money before we crossed the border.  It was great.  They gave us Canadian dollars for our Greenbacks one-to-one.  Suppose it will come out that even when we exchange our leftovers on the way back?

 

Things seem to cost a little more here dollar-for-dollar.

 

They speak a foreign tongue, but we’re mastering it.  We had a chat with someone from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, and she said we hardly had any accent at all, eh?

 

All the road signs are bilingual; English and French.  Now we can screw up French pronunciations as we drive along instead of Spanish like we usually do in South Texas.

 

I get to drive 100.

 

They measure distance in kilometers.  That’s not a difficult conversion for us.  Kilometers to miles: about 1 to 0.6.  Meters to feet:  about 1 to 3.  We’re even starting to think in metric instead of making every conversion.

 

Fuel is a different matter.  Gasoline only costs $1 per unit, but the unit is not gallons, it’s litres.  I guess since I don’t really know the dollar-to-dollar conversion, there’s no point in taxing my brain trying to convert litres to gallons at the same time.  I just watched the dollars on the pump instead of the gallons (litres).  It cost us $60 to fill up the Jeep, so I think we lost a little ground on that exchange.  Diesel costs less than gas.

 

Temperature is measured in centigrade.  Doesn’t matter to us.  All our thermometers still read Fahrenheit.

 

There is a weight limit posted on a bridge.  4,500 kg.  What are we supposed to do with that?  Does that even mean anything?

 

And road warning signs.  There are some different ones here.  If you see a sign with a drawing that looks like a dead beaver, that means there is a bump coming.  If you see a sign that looks like a whole family of beavers got run over, it means there is a whole rough patch of road coming up.

 

That’s it.  I think we’ve mastered everything except metric time.  How do you tell time to the base ten?

 

 

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