South meets North

So I'm sitting on this plane leaving Beijing and heading to Mongolia and this rather tall dude is sitting beside me. I strike up a conversation during the 3hr flight. We go on our separate adventures, he goes to the Gobi desert and I head for the Altai Mountains. A year later the dude comes for a visit to Canada. Isn't this how it works with most people? :-)

Soooooo to back up abit. John and I did meet on the plane, after the flight we exchanged email addresses and struck up an email friendship. He ended up being on business in Seattle and thought "Hey why not visit Lise in Calgary"

So the New Yorker comes to the Cow-Town. John had been to Toronto but never been West. I took him on the standard tourist junket, Banff and Lake Louise. There's a reason its so popular, it has a rather large "wow" factor.

The first night John was here I had a dinner party with my best friends. I figured if John could deal with them and all their idiosyncacies then he was probably a tough and resilient fellow. But coming from the Bronx in NYC this was chump change for him. Fhuggetaboutit....

Over the course of a couple days John was exposed to the differences between American and Canadian culture. I think the average American would assume that Canadians are just like them except live in a colder climate, whereas most Canadians consider themselves fundamentally different than their American neighbours. I think the biggest surprise for John was that we aren't always that nice and accomodating. I did make him take a shot of my parent's moonshine which almost made him hurl the lovely dinner we had just ate, OK.... so that wasn't so nice. Him and I had similar views on Dubya Bush, although he did seem bemused at my concern that America could at some point in the future turn into a foe when they start running out of water and look to their northern neighbours' vast resources. (but thats another rant all together) I schooled him in the Canadian love of beer, making him try our popular brands and he learned first hand about our unpredicatable mountain weather. Apparently my mountain climbing concern about weather and commenting on the approaching lightening while we were riding down from Sulpher Mountain does nothing to to help a nervous american sitting in a metal gondola as the weather storms around us and the gondola stops...

Here is John's suggestion of how I should describe his visit:

This is my friend John, he came to Canada, I made him jump up and down like a monkey and had Canadian flags pop out of his head and took pictures. In this picture I cut off John's legs with my ice axes because the f**ker ate my gateau chocolate, then I dropped his sorry ass in a lake. Don't mess with us Canadian chicks or a similar fate awaits you.

*Editors note: Ya John did make a move on my Chocolate Molten Lava cake, hence how he found out the hard way that Canadians are not all that nice.