Falling into Autumn

It is beginning to turn a bit cooler in Vancouver these days. Just yesterday I finally put away my sandals, most likely for a while. It still is strange to be coming upon a Halloween without the risk of snow. Growing up in Montana meant incorporating a winter jacket in some way into your Halloween costume. As my birthday falls right before Halloween, the only time I saw other kids' actual costumes was either at school or at my birthday party. When we went tricker treating we all had jackets and often snowpants. Lets be clear on one thing, ninjas in snow pants are not terribly stealthy.

Being in Canada for holidays always feels weird because they just have a different interpretation on what it means. For them Halloween involves fireworks (at least for B.C.) and comes after a very toned down version of Thanksgiving in which they have a three day weekend where the day off is Monday. Christy, a professor in the SA department (who also happens to be Fernando's wife and an American), and I were talking about the difference between Canadian "Fakesgiving" and Thanksgiving in the U.S. She asked her students what the mythology surrounding Thanksgiving was for Canadians. All she got was confused looks. "What do you mean 'mythology,' it is just a holiday." She went on to explain how in the U.S. it is all about pilgrims and Native Americans and the first Thanksgiving. The students were aghast that she had been dressed up as a pilgrim as a child for celebrations. I got to think about it further and came to a shocking realization: They have no Black Friday (Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving where a ton of U.S. shopping takes place, particularly Christmas shopping, and it is often responsible for putting companies into a profit for the year [putting them in the "black"]). How the Canadian economy exist without such a watershed I fail to comprehend.

Another odd thing I have begun to notice about Canada is the odd "one-off" nature of Canadian restaurants. Many of them take on the name of U.S. cities or states and then peddle a product that in the U.S. is not associated with that state or city. Things like Montana's Pizza, Cactus Cafe (despite there being no cacti in Canada), and Hollywood Cafe (a totally creepy Chinese place in a shady part of town). A prime example is Boston Pizza (an underwhelming pizza and pasta place) whose humble beginnings are quoted on the website as:

"It started with Gus Agiortis, a Greek immigrant who had jumped ship in Vancouver, and then opened the first Boston Pizza in Edmonton, Alberta in 1964. He worked tirelessly to make pizza a household name in Western Canada. Gus' first restaurant was known as "Boston Pizza and Spaghetti House."

Now I am sure Boston has fine pizza. But it is not known in the U.S. as a beacon of excellence for pizza as Chicago or New York are. This sort of reinvention of American culinary traditions is rather confusing. Particularly when Canadians assume that these chains have their origins in the U.S. They are continually surprised when I point out that most of the chains don't exist in at least the Western part of the U.S. and that I have never heard of them.

Another common thing, at least in BC, is the popularity of inauthentic "authentic" food. A well regarded restaurant here, The White Spot (which is an unusually appropriate name because the place is totally full of crackers, and not the type you dip in soup), tries to recreate a host of foods from around the world and make them amenable to the bland Canadian/North American palate. The overwhelmingly "Olive Garden" type crowd that frequents this establishment is a testament to the dumbing down of the quality and taste of the originals that are poached to create their menu. While I have no problem with giving people more options for dining, I can't help but wonder why can't people looking for Thai food just go to a Thai restaurant.