Canada is a beautiful country filled with wonderful people, and I was absolutely enamored … until I tried to buy gas.
That’s when the panic set in.
“$143 a gallon?!?” I screamed as I approached the gas pump, sweat forming across my brow. I was staring at the price shown on the digital display. “Oh my God, we have to go home! We can’t afford to drive 25 feet!”
Here we were about to traverse hundreds of miles across this country, and I was going to need a mortgage just to fill-up.
Oh, the joys of international travel. Even a country so similar to us has its many nuances and quirks and fun traditions to discover … not to mention confuse dumb people like me. For instance, how Canada lists gas prices in cents per liter.
OHHHH!!!!! Well, that makes … uh … absolutely no sense! A liter?!? You buy soda in a 2-liter bottle, but why in the world would you buy so little gas?
OHHHH!!!!! It’s the metric system, dummy. And small minds like mine, which don’t even know the name of OUR measurement system, can’t figure out the metric system to save our lives. (No, I didn’t pay attention in grade school.)
Take for instance, kilometers, their unit of distance. I assume this is Latin for “lots of meters,” but I have no earthly idea how many. From running races, I know that 5 kilometers is really 3.1 miles. Which has never made any sense to me, because why don’t we just stop at 3 miles? I mean, why do we have to run an extra .1? We’re tired. We want to stop. The metric system is cruel!
Small brains like mine struggle with this. “So, if it’s 400 kilometers to Banff then it must be like … um … more than 750 races?!? Oh, forget it … Let’s just get some airplane tickets!”
The speedometers are measured in kilometers per hour (kmh). Here in the U.S. my car includes kmh, which is odd because I’ve never driven it in a running race. So that feature has no value to me. But Canada’s cars don’t reciprocate and provide us with mph. They figure we’re smart enough to figure it out. But guess what? I’m NOT smart enough and I CAN’T figure it out!
I spent the whole time driving around going who-knows-how-fast. My wife would start yelling at me, “YOU CRAZY MANIAC!!! YOU’RE DOING 100 KILOMETERS AN HOUR!!!”
“OH MY GOD!” I would scream back, and immediately slam on the brakes, sending us careening and veering and swerving all over the road.
But it turns out that’s only like 62 mph. And in the States you don’t back out of your driveway unless you’re going at least 62.
Don’t get me started on Celsius. When I told one Canadian it was 95 degrees in Florida, she said, “Wow! That’s like 35 degrees Celsius.”
“No,” I said. “It’s like 95 degrees Fahrenheit! Now, please point me to the nearest mortgage company so I can buy another liter of gas.”