Alberta Vs. Ontario/Quebec Round TWO
First of all I would like to retract a past statement. In an older blog I said that there was no deposit for pop/water bottles. This is in fact, false. They do not pay deposit in Ontario. You can get money for these bottles on the Quebec side (not for juice boxes or milk cartons) which is good news for us. This was confirmed with two different couples we are friends with that live in Gatineau and in Montreal. Apparently you can bring bottles into many different groceries stores and they have a separate area in the front of the store for deposit. So it looks like I have my work cut out for me in gathering up all the bottles I see when I go for walks. I will make this city clean and get paid for doing it!! Ha ha!
Okay, now back to the other differences that I have noticed....
Grocery stores are
even different in Gatineau. Here, you are able to purchase alcohol a few steps away
from your dairy products (same as the United States). In Alberta, the liquor
stores must be separate.
On the Quebec side of
Ottawa everything, everything is listed in French and if you are lucky there is
English in tiny lettering underneath. Until my French gets better I have to
bring my glasses when shopping at Wal-mart. Good thing I got those glasses from Dr. Hornberger before moving out here!
Another difference
that makes my head shake is that at 90% of stores, if you want to purchase 4L
of milk it comes in a bag. A bag people! To me, this is a disaster waiting to
happen. Dave says a lot of people buy bags of milk and store them in small pitchers
in their fridges. Many times I have seen spilt milk in the dairy section. Not
from being in a carton but a bag bursting or getting snagged on something. Not
cool. At first I told David, "No, we aren't doing that." Then I thought about it for a while and really, it didn't make sense for my straight out objection. I guess I wasn't ready to make that change. It's like, I don't know if you have ever had an experience like that, or a lot of experiences like that, but I didn't want to do something new and didn't really base my opinion on anything other than being stubborn. We now frequently buy bags of milk. A 4L of milk comes in three separate pouches. I have pictures to demonstrate what this looks like in action.
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| Here is a bag of 4L of milk. Notice it is 1%. I would normally get Skim milk when I was a single gal and David prefers 2%. Marriage is all about compromise. |
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| So this is a pouch inside the pitcher. |
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| Yes,I did spill some. Good eye! It's hard to pour things while taking a picture of a pitcher. |
Another difference!!! People here are
generally really smart. There is less of the redneck, trailer trash, truck
driving oil pigs you may find in any given Albertan city or small town and a more
hipster, environmentally aware, cultured folk. Yes, I said folk (I still have
my Albertan, red-neck roots). I have yet
to see a pair of truck nuts/bumper balls, whatever you want to call them even
on the more “open” French side. Don’t get me wrong, people still drive like @$$es
here (that’s a whole other difference to expand on). Ottawa, in the past has
been reported as the city with the highest level of education, it has the most
PhD’s per person. I couldn’t find a link to a more current article, but here’s
one from a 2008 census.
Mind you Edmonton and Calgary both did well in that article, but still. Check out EXHIBIT A:
Now I may be wrong,
but when I see graffiti in Alberta it usually has some sort of gang symbol or
name, profanity, or simply, I cannot make out the lettering/meaning because it
looks like a five year old got happy with paint. Occasionally in Edmonton (not
so much in Lethbridge), I will see some street art that has a political message
but that’s a rarity. Here, on the Alexandra Bridge, someone made a Lord the
Rings of reference by spray painting the words “Frodo Lives”. You don’t see
this every day. I thought my brothers (namely Alan and Adam) who are huge Lord
of the Rings fans would get a kick out of this. I talked to David about why
someone would feel the need to write this in spray paint. I am thinking that
this IS an anti-religion/establishment message as Frodo represents a type of
Christ figure that is torn about sacrificing the ring (which is ultimately a
part of his body/himself) for the greater good of Middle-earth/mankind. The
nerdy person probably thought it was a clever, satirical approach to dissing
religion. David thought I was reading into this too much. Perhaps. I still think I was right. (Side note/Teaser:
I have been gathering photos of other funny/awesome graffiti that I will
showcase in a separate blog.)
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