Ottawa

It's been a few days since my last proper update. This has been partially due to cranky internet access and partly due to being on the road for much of the time. As y'all remember I had a somewhat diffcult time crossing into Canada. Toronto traffic was hellish but I finally reached Ottawa in one piece.

Ottawa is a nice city, one that I will definitely come back to when I do my trip from coast to coast in Canada, sometime in the hopefully not too distant future. As a capital city it houses Parliament and a hole host of other important and interesting buildings, and it has some very nice parks, canals and architecture, none of which I managed to take photos of. Yes, I'm an eejit.

On July 1, Canada Day, I hooked up with a longtime friend who I'd never met before. Yeah, she's an old chathouse pal that I've been trading insults with on msn and later facebook for many years. She's always been on my case about coming to Canada and Ottawa was the place to be on Canada Day and yadda, yadda, yadda. So finally I obliged.

We drove around downtown, through a labyrinth of closed streets, so I got a somewhat abbreviated guided tour. Still, more than enough to make me want to explore more. The next day I was invited over to her house, where her mom she was cooking up a storm. Two friends of the family and three foreign exchange students were also there and we all stuffed face on BBQ and assorted goodies and had a good ole time around the table. Canucks are a hospitable people, much like the yanks (but oh, how they hate being compared to their southern cousins) and I look forward to seeing them again... minus the retarded border control, that is.

Niagara Falls

Friday afternoon I went down to Niagara Falls to take pics of the famous waterfalls. Without having been to the US side, I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that they are best viewed from the canuck side. Mighty purdy anyway.

All pics here.

Some overview pics:




Some close-ups:




Canada on the left, the US on the right.


From above the falls on the Canadian side.

Dear Canada

I appreciate your concern for the wellbeing of your citizens and your desire to run a tight ship on your border, I really do. However, if, in your eagerness to protect your territorial integrity, you might have forgotten to employ actual hominids, allow me to give you this gentle reminder.

Even in dirty, rotten, corrupt kleptocracies like Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine, the border guards have the courtesy of asking you to show them your luggage. They will ask you to open anything that may be closed. In America, that country so often reviled for harsh border controls, they will only open your luggage and go through it while you personally view the proceedings.

Imagine then my surprise when, upon crossing your border Friday morning some miles north of Detroit, I was met by two young specimens I can only describe as being of a simian disposition. Not only were they inquisitive bordering (ahaha) upon the insane, they also went through my personal belongings like a group of chimps looking for bananas.

First, I was ordered sternly to the front of the car while these two baboons wearing the proud maple leaf went through my luggage without me having any way of controlling what they were doing. They checked the contents of my camera without asking and without any regard for my privacy. They went through my luggage in the trunk, without bothering to put stuff back where it belonged or to close the various suitcases and bags whence they had been removed. They did this without informing me about what they'd done, so that I only discovered the carnage that was my luggage upon arrival in Toronto, several hours later.

At no point during this ordeal did I have the opportunity to see what they were up to, so that theoretically they could have stuffed whatever they so whished into my luggage. Both as a matter of judicial principle and of privacy, this is completely out of line for any border authority, especially one in a civilized country with a reputation for courtesy and friendliness such as Canada.

Yours disappointedly,

Ghost

PS: You need to add about ten lanes - each way - to the ON 401 going through Toronto, so as not to have infernal traffic jams on weekends. Might I suggest a small nuclear device? I'm sure nobody in Toronto would notice.