I'm doing 18 things
I went to Canada for the first time on Saturday night. Reaching Canada has been a goal of mine for many years now. You see I’ve traveled a lot in the last ten years to many continents and regions. I’ve been to the complete opposite side of the world from where I was born. However going to Canada has somehow eluded me. I guess I just never had a reason.
That was true until Saturday night. My friend Dave is recently single and my girlfriend is off in San Francisco visiting a friend so it was just the boys for the weekend. We went to a see a movie I was excited about (Wristcutters) and having loved it and thus being in particularly good moods we didn’t want to go home. So in a split second decision we headed north on I-5, “Let’s go to Seattle for breakfast”. That was until halfway there when we realized that neither of us had been to Canada and that it was only an extra 2-3 hours. So it was settled in that amount of time. I was very excited about the prospect of completing my North American dominance by having visited every country on the this continent.
There is a problem though. Canadians don’t like spontaneity. Upon arriving at the Canadian border we were instantly flagged for saying we were only staying for one day and that the purpose of our trip was breakfast. The first screener refused to look at us when we talked to him and passed us on to secondary screening. We figured it was late at night, about 3:30am, so they were screening most people. We got inside and walked up to the counter and completely unprepared for the interrogation we then received. We were thoroughly asked about our decision making process, why we didn’t have bags, what we were doing before we got there, what we intended to do, where we came from, who we are, where we work, and our affiliations. We were then lectured for a couple of minutes on why weren’t normal people.
“Normal people do not go to a foreign country on a whim. Normal people bring a bag when they are traveling. Normal people don’t travel hundreds of miles in the middle of the night to have breakfast. You didn’t even bring toothbrushes?”
To which we replied, “No, no toothbrushes.”
“You always bring a toothbrush, normal people bring toothbrushes.”
“We didn’t.”
“So you are coming up here to eat breakfast then you are going to leave the same day and go back?”
At this point Dave tried to be friendly and make some kind of connection with the Officer.
“Yes, do you have any recommendations for breakfast, by the way?”
I’d like to note that I’m pretty sure that this guy put hair gel in his eyebrows. They had the same look and spiky-ness of his hair.
“Are you kidding me? Don’t ask me for breakfast recommendations. I’m deciding on whether or not you get to enter the country. We are investigating you for drug running. Do I like like the Canadian Information Booth? No, don’t get ahead of yourself there, buddy. Don’t ask me for breakfast recommendations.”
“Sorry.”
Then we went to the third stage of interrogation where we had to get searched and let them search the car. We didn’t have anything so they didn’t find anything. After that things lightened up. We talked about iPhones and relationships, and the movie we saw. The guards let us know that watching a love story after breaking up and then deciding to drive to Canada wasn’t the best of ideas. They told us they were sad we didn’t have any crack cause they wanted to buy some from us. They quickly morphed into the Canadians that I came know during the short trip. Friendly, quirky, and funny. We left on good terms with a recommendation for a hotel and breakfast, as well as an admonishment to not try border crossing so late at night.
Vancouver was lovely, it’s very diverse. I wish I would’ve brought a toothbrush.
