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Nessa posted:Yup. Lot's of farm land. Most of the population lives within a couple hours of the US border. The further north the you go, the less there is, then you get into permafrost areas where nothing can really grow. I flew from Calgary to Peace River the other day, and it's really striking just how much loving nothingness there is along that route. And then you realize that the southern part of the "north", like Yellowknife, are as far again as you've just travelled and there's whole expanses of even more nothingness way north of that.
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May 16, 2017 20:52
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I'm Canadian and I say y'all all the time. It's not something I'd use in a formal situation, but casually, for sure. I also say eh a whole bunch.
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May 22, 2017 18:22
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I'm in Montreal tonight after being in Ottawa today. I drove here. Also did very little research. For instance I had no idea you all had a holiday today. That's PT6A's Law of International Travel -- you will always arrive on a day which is unexpectedly a holiday or something else that will gently caress you up. Did you know, for example, that Cuba switches to daylight saving time on a completely different date from North America? And I arrived on that very evening, near the time the official change takes place! Boy howdy that was a confusing few hours. I've also managed to arrive in Spain on what is apparently their Mother's Day (which frightened me a great deal, because apart from a bunch of things being closed/busy/etc., I thought I'd missed Mother's Day to call my mum). This holiday is to celebrate our beloved Queen Victoria or something I think. All I know was that traffic was right hosed when I tried to go about my normal business today.
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May 23, 2017 04:29
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I woke up today with a serious craving for some Tim's Of all the Canadian things you could possibly ever crave: why that? EDIT: I guess Timbits are pretty drat good, it's just everything else that's awful.
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May 24, 2017 23:34
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Nessa posted:I think it's a nice city! Their downtown mall is really cool and way nicer than ours, their train system has a free ride zone downtown and the train goes right to the greyhound station, so it's real easy to get around by bus and train. Edmonton recently tore down our downtown Greyhound station, so the Greyhound now shares a location with Via Rail, 5Km outside of downtown in an area with no sidewalks and only 2 busses per day. Back in the winter, there was a news segment showing European travellers dragging their wheeled luggage through unplowed snow the 5km to get downtown. People are real mad that there are no plans for a more accessible Greyhound station. The drivers here are all terrible and I hate them. It's gotten even worse since I decided to stop being a teenage-minded prick and actually drive the speed limit on a consistent basis -- now I have to deal with the same slow, oblivious tools, but also the many tailgaters who believe it's appropriate to go 80 km/h through a construction zone. I've only been to Edmonton once, but I have a very good impression of it even if there's a rivalry between the cities. Public transit to and from the airport is a serious issue in both cities, though...
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May 28, 2017 00:31
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Macarius Wrench posted:Wow there are a heck of a lot of random little settlements in Canada called Fort X. Four freaking hours for a McDonalds though, jesus. I suppose it helps to be trained in auto-repairs since so many people there are going to be car owners. The driving test is ridiculously easy, but in theory to get your full license (as opposed to a restricted license which still permits you to drive alone), you have to demonstrate being able to drive in city traffic and handle things like merging. There are no experience requirements, and you don't need to demonstrate winter driving ability. Unlike the UK, you can take the test in an automatic and then drive a manual.
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May 28, 2017 21:33
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A lot of that hope was tied to offshore oil, I think, and, well, oil's not doing so hot right now.
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May 30, 2017 04:08
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:For a second I thought someone in Canada had turned a Boeing 747 into a bus, and was really excited. Then I realized you meant the route number of the bus and I was disappointed again. Yeah, I can't say I took Edmonton's airport bus route, but Calgary's loving sucks. First of all, it costs three times as much as every other transit route in the city. Second of all, it neither goes to the nearest C-Train station (which is very close to the airport geographically, but impossible to reach directly) nor does it take an efficient route downtown. Instead, it takes a long, transit-only route with a speed limit of 50 km/h through residential areas, with a whole bunch of stops, taking over twice as long to reach downtown as it would in a taxi or car, and it doesn't actually connect with the C-Train network until you reach downtown itself. I can only imagine they got paid off by the taxi companies to make it suck as much as humanly possible. Not to mention, our entire transit system is designed to use the city centre as a destination and/or hub, so it's especially nonsensical to not provide an express bus to and from the city centre from the airport. Compare that with some cities I've been to in Europe: it's actually easier and faster, not to mention cheaper, to use transit to get to the city centre.
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Jun 5, 2017 06:16
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Kritzkrieg Kop posted:OK everyone likes to say their city/town has the worst drivers.....OBJECTIVELY who really has the worst drivers? And where is it actually the worst place to drive in? Alberta has the worst drivers by far, and Calgary probably has the worst drivers in the province of Alberta. There's a TV show up here called "Canada's Worst Driver" and Alberta always puts up some really, really strong candidates. Saskatchewan drivers are hell to follow through the mountains because they're poo poo at dealing with things like "hills" and "corners," so they're really bad at maintaining a consistent speed and also extremely difficult to pass because they'll frequently speed up on the few straight sections you can use to overtake.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:38
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:I haven't been to every province, but Quebec drivers were the only ones where I was actually scared to be in the car. It was a combo of bad, dangerous driving, and Quebecs really lovely roads. On the other hand, Quebec is the one province where it's law to stay the gently caress out of the left hand lane of a highway if you're not passing, so they are doing God's work.
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Jun 5, 2017 20:35
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It's not just evenings -- weekends downtown will also provide you a wonderful opportunity to see what the post-apocalypse would look like if just crackheads and drunks were left alive. We've had a few stabbings in the middle of downtown recently, too -- one was completely random and took place on a C-Train platform.
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Jun 8, 2017 14:35
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:LOL YEAH- no one has to work on weekends in Canada except the druggies, what a paradise!! Us normals don't do drugs or drink, and definitely don't pay to get even more drugs!! I have the feeling you don't really want to discuss this in good faith, but I'll try anyway. I live in downtown Calgary, 7 days a week obviously, and if you don't think there's a massive change in the number of people around, and their likelihood to be very intoxicated at any given time, on weekends, I can tell you you are wrong. Most of the business downtown is Monday to Friday, 9-5 sort of stuff, and many other businesses (restaurants, retail, etc.) downtown either close or operate on very limited hours on weekends because the customer base is so much smaller. Perhaps I was just the tiniest bit hyperbolic in my earlier statement, but it can get pretty weird on a Sunday morning. There are people wandering into traffic, having yelling matches and the occasional fight with things only they can see, people passed out in bus shelters with Listerine bottles around them, and all sorts of other stuff -- these are things I saw while walking from my apartment to the grocery store just last weekend, not some kind of conjecture on my part. While these things are always around, to some degree, there are way fewer normal people around to balance things out. The rest of Calgary is fine, even significantly more active on the weekends, but downtown, being heavily office-focused, is comparatively dead and weird on weekends, even more than late at night. Sorry, that's just the way it is.
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Jun 8, 2017 18:41
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Picnic Princess posted:In one of my classes at university, we had a a social worker from the Nakoda reserve speak to us about conditions in Morley, Alberta after the 2013 floods. A lot of the houses were condemned from water damage, but the people living in the community weren't allowed to do repairs because they're government property and were expected to wait for government contractors to come in and do the work. Of course, they're at the bottom of the priority list. So what were they supposed to do if they weren't allowed to live in their home or fix it? They weren't allowed to move into relatives homes due to fire code violations. There was temporary housing on the way, but it hadn't arrived yet and this was several months after the fact. There were also limitations on the number of pets allowed in each home. So even if they could move into a relative's place, they might not be able to bring their cats and dogs because they'd be over the limit. Any defiance of rules meant they could be kicked out, because the government were pretty much landlords. Yeah, the strange legal status of reservation property is a big problem. Another issue is that (I believe, I could be mistaken on the details) since it's not allowed for non-First Nations people to own reservation land, banks cannot accept it as surety against a mortgage or anything else, removing one of the major financial instruments that most people use to be able to afford a house. Oops! I think in a lot of cases, the situation in First Nations communities across the country is basically the ultimate proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Most of the things that have hosed the First Nations over so thoroughly weren't done out of malice, but the combination of unintended consequences and the fact that most people just don't care at all enough to do anything about the problems mean that things worked out terribly.
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Jun 14, 2017 05:48
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I dunno, I think residential schools bar-none did the most damage to native communities and their explicit purpose was to stamp out the native kids cultures. Plenty of First Nations policy was created from the perspective of "these people are inferior", so "good intentions" were hosed up from the beginning. Yikes, I just noticed I deleted a sentence I didn't intend to in my earlier post concerning that, and I didn't replace it. Yes -- the residential school system was nothing short of genocide. But, at least when it started, it was done with good intentions -- it was honestly thought that the things they were doing, which we now recognize for the horrors they were, were beneficial to "civilize the Indian". That's exactly why things should be judged by the results they produce, not the spirit in which they were intended. To say that the people responsible for this great crime had good intentions is not to excuse even one bit of what they did, it's to remind us that we need more than good intentions. One of the problems is that people can say, "well, the government tried its best!" and that's complete bullshit, whether we're talking about land ownership rules that make it difficult for First Nations to access loans, or residential schools, or the provision of houses which are completely inadequate for the places they're being sent. Results matter, intentions do not.
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Jun 14, 2017 15:58
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That song is terrible, so it represents the majority of the Albertan people perfectly  I like my province, but hoooly gently caress is it full of idiots and deplorables.
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Jun 19, 2017 23:06
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flakeloaf posted:Financially the team should do well because their tickets will pretty much always sell out. I'm not sure what kind of fanbase they can grow in a town where most of the spending money comes from somewhere else, but dedicated fans of nearby teams will love the subsidized flights. You're forgetting something important, though: there will be a lot of fans supporting the home team on a temporary basis when they play the archrivals of those fans' primary team. I'd like to see a Flames game in Vegas, sure -- but I would also love to see the Golden Knights lay a beating on the Canucks, or Ducks, or Sharks, just as much (but most especially the Canucks). Enough to go to Vegas just for the game? No, probably not -- but luckily, there are plenty of other reasons to go to Vegas. I think it will be a very intense place to play, I look forward to seeing how it goes.
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Jun 20, 2017 01:03
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In Alberta you call a highway "the" if it has a name, like "the QE2" or "the Icefields Parkway" or "the Trans-Canada" but not if it has only a number. However, you may not use "the" preceding any highway which is followed by anything other than "highway." You may not say "the Stoney" or "the Glenmore." For some reason, highway 1A is an exception to the rule, because I always hear it called "the 1A." Edit: I suppose the icefields parkway is another exception, but it's a special case because you can't refer to it without "parkway."
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Jun 25, 2017 02:19
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Mak0rz posted:Yeah the Royal Tyrrell Museum has one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus skeletons: Specimen RTMP 81.6.1, otherwise known as Black Beauty It is awesome, especially for kids. And, in a case of supreme irony, I believe you can visit a creationism museum in the same town because rural Alberta is backward as gently caress from time to time. GREAT WHITE NORTH posted:Greetings, my northern neighbors, from Alaska, the Great White North(west)! Your descriptions of the rural provinces remind me a lot of traveling through the road system of Alaska, which can become a seemingly endless range of black spruce, birch trees, and near-identical rivers, lakes, and streams. That said, I enjoyed everything about my motorcycle jaunts except having my wallet stolen in Dease Lake, BC. The rest of the trips were golden though. I've traveled through the Yukon, BC, and bits of Alberta on the way to the States, and I have a few questions: 1. As others have said, it was over long before I was born, but there are still remnants of imperial. I weigh myself in pounds and measure myself in feet and inches, but I use grams on my kitchen scale to measure ingredients, and I use kilometers* to measure distance and speed. I really, really hate Fahrenheit. I know that 0 is cold as gently caress, 32 is freezing, and 80 is too goddamn hot, but I don't have any intuition for what 40-80 "feels like." 2. I hate Tim Hortons because their coffee is awful and most of their food is awful, but Tim Bits are great and I still like them. I just don't eat them very often because it's basically pure fat and sugar. 4. For most folks in my city, he's too big of a pinko commie, and for a lot of people e.g. in the Canada Politics thread in D&D he's too much of a neoliberal. Personally, I like him, and most of the people in my social circle like him. What will end up doing him in is, in the words of Thatcher, "the middle of the road is a very dangerous place to stand; you get hit by traffic from both sides." In that respect, I suppose you could compare him to Hillary Clinton, except he won. The Conservative parties at various levels are always on the brink of making a big comeback, but they all choose the most atrocious leaders, so I think a lot of people that lean Conservative but aren't nuts about it will continue to vote for Trudeau. Slim Jim Pickens posted:lol the worst place in Canada vis a vis nutso conservatism is the Niagara Peninsula Mak0rz posted:News to me! Though I'd contest the claim that it's "the worst" judging from the people I've meet living and working around Calgary and elsewhere in rural Alberta. I think the conservatism is different in character between those places. In Ontario, you tend to have "rich banker" conservatives, with the occasional smattering of xenophobes and assorted loons, but in Alberta you get the full on "prevent Sharia NOW and also the gays caused that massive flood from a few years back by getting married" types that go to bible colleges and start creationism museums and hand out anti-abortion flyers on the street. I think they're probably just a loud minority, Calgary did after all elect a Muslim mayor twice in a row in relative landslides.
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Jun 30, 2017 16:01
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Nessa posted:When I was at college, there was a Tim's on the main floor that would have a crazy lineup every morning, and forget about roll up the rim season. During the summer, the school had another Tim's put in across the street to lessen the traffic at the other one. At the University of Calgary, there are two separate Tim Horton's locations right beside each other in the student union building. There are additional Tim Horton's elsewhere on campus. There is always a lineup at every one of them.
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Jun 30, 2017 18:37
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Veth posted:I'm moving to Calgary in September and all this Tim Horton's hate is very disheartening, however justified it might be. Luckily we have many good places to buy both coffee and food that isn't terrible, rendering Tim Hortons largely unnecessary.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:51
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Mak0rz posted:I've always been fond of Good Earth. Yeah that's where I go if I've run out of coffee beans or I need a coffee while I'm out. If you happen to be in the area, Analog is fantastic but I refuse to walk 11 blocks just to get a cup of coffee.
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Jul 17, 2017 21:40
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$1200/year on a Mustang. 28, male, clean record, in Alberta. That includes collision, comprehensive and $2mil liability.
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Jul 19, 2017 16:49
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Eastern winters suck ballsacks, I'll take a few weeks of -40 interspersed with chinooks at +15, and plenty of sunshine, rather than endless, dreary, damp "hovering around 0" poo poo for 5 months. EDIT: But on the other hand, if you're from the UK, you'll be very familiar with it with the exception that things will still run when it snows. PT6A fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Jul 20, 2017 |
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Jul 20, 2017 04:37
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GeorginaSpica posted:Bikes as in bicycles? When I was in Calgary, I rented a bicycle and rode mostly on the paths from downtown to Glenmore park around the reservoir and back. Whenever I was stopped at a side street attempting to cross the busier road, traffic stopped in both directions to let me cross. I didn't know what to make of it! That never ever ever happens in Toronto. I wondered if they were lining up to take me out! lol I waved and nodded thanks as I rode across. The problem is that the bike paths downtown were very poorly thought out and have caused a great deal of unpleasantness. There are two-way bike paths on one-way streets, which fucks everything up because all of a sudden, two-phase intersections are turned into three- or four-phase intersections. They should've just put them one-way on one-way streets, but they didn't want to remove a lane on multiple one-way streets unless they had to, so now we get to deal with this. In a similar but apparently unrelated fuckup, they also decided that a major one-way avenue should become a two-way avenue, and it's just a horrible pain when you're driving, but even worse when you're walking, because now you have to deal with protected turns where you can't cross in either direction!
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Aug 10, 2017 03:06
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A big part of the problem with the First Nations is that the government forced them onto lovely, isolated land, that's often inaccessible, proper nutrition is exorbitantly expensive, and now we wonder loudly why they have so many problems related to isolation and poverty. A friend of mine worked in a fly-in fly-out reserve for a while, and while he liked it for the most part, a lot of his co-workers were having breakdowns and counting the days until their posting was done, and apparently it was a terrible work environment because most everyone had a ridiculously short fuse. These are people on two-year postings, mind you. It's absolutely no mystery to any sane person why a lot of people who grew up and live in that environment long-term can begin to lose hope, and that's before you start looking at factors like the intergenerational trauma caused by the residential school system and other horrible crimes perpetrated against them.
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Dec 22, 2017 15:30
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Chatrapati posted:A friend of mine flew over to some isolated part of the Western coast of Greenland a couple of years ago and said it was one of the most depressing places on Earth. There were strict rules about alcohol because locals would drink and kill themselves, or drink themselves ot death. Don't know how related this is to your story honestly, but the American arctic seems like a pretty crappy place to live. Substance abuse is apparently a big problem. My friend was an RCMP officer up there, and he estimated well over half of his calls were alcohol-fuelled. Some communities are dry, others are not. In the dry communities, people will make their own booze with fruit juice, sugar and yeast, kind of like prison. Taking away alcohol is only treating a symptom, not the disease, though. If you get rid of alcohol, next you'll be asking how to stop the suicide epidemic, or whatever else pops up, because the underlying problem is poverty, an intergenerational abuse and neglect problem originated by the residential school system, isolation, and a lack of opportunity.
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Dec 23, 2017 01:27
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Nessa posted:One of my favourite places is Drumheller, Alberta. When you drive there, there's a lot of flat prairie that suddenly opens up into a vast expanse of beautiful desert canyons. Drumheller has a wonderful dinosaur museum and the whole town is dinosaur themed with statues all around. Even the McDonalds has a big dinosaur mural on the inside. I'd been there as a kid, and I sort of remember the jarring change in landscape, but recently I flew there and it's even more striking from the air. It's a really abrupt transition, too -- I wasn't expecting that, I was sort of expecting a zone where the two landscapes kind of blend into each other, but nope! There's also a lot of beautiful country that hardly anyone ever sees because it's so goddamn remote. When I went up to Peace River, it was just miles and miles of beautiful, rugged country with absolutely loving nothing in it. And it only gets less populated once you head north of Peace!
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Dec 23, 2017 03:03
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Odddzy posted:Is Poutine a Québecois dish or Canadian? The rest of the country thinks they know how to make poutine, but only Quebec actually can do it properly for some reason.
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Feb 27, 2018 15:08
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Baronjutter posted:I've known a few fellow Canadians who have gone on trips to see Quebec and to see atlantic canada and enjoyed them, but domestic tourism isn't a big draw here, not a lot of places worth the effort of visiting. Most time people travel it's "Uhg, I have to visit my family in Winnipeg" or "uhg I need to go to Toronto for this finance conference" or "Uhg the military is forcing me to move to Edmonton". Tourism wise, most of Canada is pretty lame. It's really not, we just don't appreciate what we have and also we tend to save our tourism/discretionary money to get the gently caress out of our country in winter. People come from overseas just to see Banff and Jasper and poo poo like that, I wouldn't call it "lame."
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Mar 6, 2018 20:27
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:People stopped having that 20 years ago. The "woe is me, I'm a broke Canadian; full communism now!" thread is in D&D, friend.
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Mar 7, 2018 01:44
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tuyop posted:Counterpoint: alberta is full of people who actually think evolution is a myth and you’re constantly assaulted by pro-life posters on the highways. Also, speed cameras. And most of it just hideous flat space or lovely swamp woods. Like 1/8 of the province is quite nice and at that point you’re basically just in BC. Where the gently caress were you driving that you saw a pro-life billboard? I've lived here most of my life and I've never seen one.
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Mar 8, 2018 03:37
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tuyop posted:They’re in the LRT stations in Edmonton, around campus at U of A, if you drive in literally any direction out of Edmonton but South you’ll see four or five within a couple of hours. They’re everywhere. I think Albertans just learn to not see them or something, but they’re very shocking to me every time. Huh. Never seen anything like that in or around Calgary. I'd expect to see that poo poo further south towards Cardston and whatnot, because that's where crazy people live (first Mormon temple outside of the US!). As Mak0rz says, we have the groups that protest in person. They're fun because you can yell and curse at them in public if you're having a lovely day and people will be happy about it. It's very cathartic.
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Mar 8, 2018 14:53
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flakeloaf posted:I'd honestly never thought about doing this because it's the same two old crazies now standing the provincially-mandated 51 metres from the door, and I figure they'd be much happier for the attention than they would be sad about the tirade. Like a dog that barks at nothing because he knows you'll come pay attention to him for a while. Yeah, that'd be questionable, I'm talking about the one's that set up in the middle of a university campus or at transit stops, just to show people disgusting pictures and compare abortion to the Holocaust (I generally like to make that the focus of my rants at them, since it's especially offensive).
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Mar 8, 2018 15:10
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WhatEvil posted:So a couple of people mentioned Ottawa and I thought I'd take a look at houses: No personal experience, but a friend of mine from high school lives in Ottawa right now and he really likes it. It also seems super affordable compared to most cities, so that's good.
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Mar 9, 2018 14:17
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WHY BONER NOW posted:I assume the biggest threat in Canada is the other drivers? Just like in the states, especially after the first snowfall of the year--it's like everyone forgets how to drive on it. Oh, you better believe it, friend!
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Mar 17, 2018 21:10
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| # ¿ May 1, 2024 23:18 |
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Sometimes non-touristy, mid-level cities can be cool places to visit, just because they tend towards being inexpensive and not crowded, while still being interesting. I don't think Hamilton is one of those cities, though.
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Mar 22, 2018 16:39
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