Friend, I would like to share with you my first visit to the Dominion of Canada. It was the strangest 38 minutes I had lived until that point.
My nephew was going to school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and after most of a day at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, I pestered him to take us all to Canada so we could say we had been. He said okay, but under no circumstances were we to respond to the crossing guard that the purpose of our trip was to in anyway malign the Queen, as his buddy had been thrown in jail overnight for making an off color remark about her to a crossing guard.
So we went south to Canada, I know, but that was what we did, we drove south from Detroit to Windsor, Ontario. We passed from sky scrapers to neatly laid off squares and Esso Stations, something I had not seen in many years.
We drove down to a park on the river, a large convention center had a banner out that they were having a Star Trek Convention, right then, but no one seemed to be around except this 6 ft. 5 in. Amazon woman on rollerskates who was selling cans of coke from a cooler for a dollar each. She was my first exposure to the amazing mental gymnastics involved with currency exchange that it seems all in the public sector in Canada must be familiar with to function.
Walking thru the park there was a Mexican Gospel Mariachi Band playing, extolling the virtues of Jesus in Spanish, that got old quick, so we went down the street to a middle easter owned antique store. We were greeted at the door by the proprietor who was telling another man you had to watch every single person that comes in the shop because they will rob you blind and then turns to us, smiling, "welcome, please come in".
I puttered around and found an old tinted postcard of the Sunken Garden there in Windsor. I think it was 75 cents. I handed my American dollar to the nervous woman at the counter and she opened her cash register drawer, Canadian Money on one side, American Money on the other side, calculated the exchange in her head, wrote me out a hand written receipt that was larger than the post card, with the GST, PST and the other tax on it. (I later framed them together and hung it in my bedroom).
Exiting the store, we were soon followed by an obese couple with developmental disabilities, the woman practically yelling at the man: "It doesn't' matter, nothing will ever be the same again".
I told my nephew I was satisfied and hungry, lets go back.
And that is my story.