RE: Visitors Guide to Vancouver

Two shots, nice!  

 

Canadians generally do not consider themselves American, no more than
Massachusetts or Californian residents pride themselves on being
Alabamans or Texans.  And no more than Argentinian's or Brazillians
consider themselves "American" because they live in South America.
Different political entities and all that.  

 

Probably 99.99% of the world considers the term "American" to be short
for "United States of America" rather than short for "North American".
Just to help a bit, there's a company called "google" that has this
really neat map feature, it's at http://maps.google.ca/?hl=en.  If you
take a look at the map, above the US states from Washington to Maine,
there's a really big space that has the word "Canada" in the middle.
That's a whole 'nother nation in the continent of "North America", can
you believe it?.  The meetings for WS-Addressing are in the very bottom
left of "Canada", just above Seattle and with the "Georgia Straight" to
the west.  There's also a country to the south of California to Texas,
even though the map shows it as blank.

 

One tip that I can readily offer is that if you would like to "go
native" in Canada, you can try a slightly different saying of words that
contain "out", starting with "out and about".  It sounds almost like
"oot", as in "oot and aboot".  Another trick is to periodically end
sentences with "eh".  One thing not to do, is to wear a backpack with a
big Canadian flag.  Apparently that's mandatory gear for Americans
traveling to Europe these days.  But people can always tell the
difference, because Canadians of course have a small Canadian flag on
their back pack.  

 

Cheers,

Dave

 

________________________________

From: Rogers, Tony [mailto:Tony.Rogers@ca.com] 
Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2006 10:12 PM
To: David Hull; David Orchard
Cc: public-ws-addressing@w3.org
Subject: RE: Visitors Guide to Vancouver

 

You really have to watch the Canadian spellings, too - most
English-speaking countries have "straits", but they have "straights" -
any bets that their "straights" are narrow?

 

:-)

 

________________________________

From: public-ws-addressing-request@w3.org on behalf of David Hull
Sent: Mon 09-Jan-06 17:08
To: David Orchard
Cc: public-ws-addressing@w3.org
Subject: Re: Visitors Guide to Vancouver

Dave,

Thanks for the writeup, and particularly the native's perspective.  A
few questions come to mind:

*	Do people speak mainly Canadian there, or will they understand
English? 
*	I notice that public parks are measured in hectares and speed
limits in km/h, but seawalls are measured in miles.  Are there any other
interesting non-metric measurements in use? 
*	Will my CDs still play in Canada, or will they have to be
converted to metric? 
*	Do Canadians consider themselves American, and if not, what
continent do they claim to live on? 

Seriously though, I still remember an incident from fifteen years or so
ago at a service counter somewhere in the bowels of YYZ.  I was coming
back from the Netherlands and had plenty of time to make my connection.
The gentleman ahead of me, also from the US, was not so fortunate.
Growing ever more irate, he told the clerk that he had been at the gate
N minutes before departure (I forget what value of N).  The clerk
informed him that he had need to be there N+k minutes before departure.
"No," the gentleman said, "the FAA regulations say N minutes."   "Sir,"
the clerk said, "it's N+k minutes," and then, with a perfectly timed
pause and icy politeness, "You're in a different country, sir."

David Orchard wrote: 

I've written up a Visitor's Guide to Vancouver at
http://www.pacificspirit.com/VancouverGuide.html.  
 
 
 
Hopefully this will provide some useful information for visitors.  Let
me know if you have any comments, criticisms, suggestions.  Bear in mind
I've been somewhat time constrained of late :-)
 
 
 
Huge, Mark, can we get this linked to from the w3c wsa registration
pages?
 
 
 
Cheers,
 
Dave