O Canada!

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I would go broke if I drove 100km on a regular basis! You guys are so lucky to have such cheap petrol. 100km would cost me about $35 in petrol, so I would have to have a pretty good reason to want to drive that far.

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I've been to Toronto three times. I can say that it is bitterly bitterly cold in the winter and unbearably swelteringly hot in the summer. It's only habitable for a few days in the spring and autumn, when it is lovely.

 

We're secretly trying to catch up and pass Russia to be the biggest country on the planet, just a little at a time

 

Well, they COULD have been Korean. I assumed Chinese because there were also a lot of Chinese restaurants in that area, but it's not like I can tell with 100% precision the difference between someone from China as compared to someone from Korea. You can tell by looking at them that they are of far eastern descent, but you can't say that person is definitely Chinese and that person is definitely Korean.

From the link you provided:

That's not exactly prime real estate to begin with, and it is curious that Denmark claims it. I don't know why they would want it, as it's a rock located between an uninhabited area of Canada and an uninhabited area of Greenland, in the middle of a body of water that is frozen over most of the winter. While proximity should not be the sole determining factor regarding ownership (see the Falklands), it's not like there's people living there.

How high are gas prices there? Here in the states, any car that gets decent mileage can go 100km on about 2 gallons worth of gas. So that's about $8 for us with the current gas prices.

*checks exchange rate for USD and NZ dollar*

1.00 NZD = 0.777 USD

So $8 USD is about $10.30 NZD. If it would cost you $35, that would be the equivalent of about $27.20 USD, which assuming you're using the same amount of gas means the price in NZ is about $3.58 per liter in USD, or about $4.60 per liter in NZD? It's that high?

I just googled a list of largest countries in the world by area just to see how close it was. Russia of course is 1st at 17.1 million square miles. I fully expected Canada to be listed 2nd, but wiki lists Antarctica as the second largest "nation" at 14 million square miles. Canada is 3rd on their list at a whisker under 10 million square miles. I just got a globe out. Antarctica does NOT look bigger than Canada. Hmmm... Although Antarctica is just one big chunk, while a lot of northern Canada is broken up by water. Maybe they are only counting land area? But still, Canada looks considerably bigger.

 

They have those machines here too - but you avoid the fee (by not using the machine) if you're willing to roll them yourself... I know my bank charges 5% if you use the machine.

I'm the same way - While I cannot articulate what about them is different, I can also tell if I look closely, so clearly there is something different, even if I'm only aware of it subconsciously . But for people I'm just passing by on the street - no way I can say with any confidence if more of them were Chinese or Korean.

 

I absolutely could not tell back when I was in high school, but after getting a degree in math at a very, very diverse school I can tell many asian groups apart now. Some of my friends in other programs at the same school have trouble, but considering the fact that my faculty had all the accounting, math and computer science students, that accounted for a lot of them. I don't mean to offend anyone by saying that, I'm just speaking out of personal experience with that.

As for the Chinatown part of Toronto, as of January I live maybe a five minute walk from there. I remember the first time I was in the area just being blown away that the street signs were in Mandarin/Cantonese/something like that. Even the major stores in that area, the banks and fast food places. Back home you would neverrr see anything like that.

I know that in Quebec it is far more common to have signs with both English and French, but I really wasn't expecting government made signs to have anything other than an official language of the country as the largest part.

 

Shop signs written in French, English, Hanzi (Chinese characters) and Vietnamese are pretty common in Montréal's China Town actually. Some of them have five the same as above plus Korean. Most ATM also have instructions in Chinese as well there.

 

Aldeth - my main car does about 400km on a tank of petrol. It takes about $150 to fill my car. Therefore, roughly $32 per 100km.

Our little car does about 400km on a tank of petrol, but only costs about $80 to fill, so that one would only cost about $20 per 100km. Less, but still enough to make me think twice about driving that far.

Anyway, driving for an hour still sounds like a long way to me, regardless of the petrol cost. That would be a big chunk of my day, so I would only do it for an overnight trip or holiday, to make it worthwhile.

 

Egads HB! That is a ton. And I would have expected that your main car would get better gas mileage. It costs me about $60 to fill up my car, but I can go approximately 400 miles on a tank of gas, which is around 650 km. So my car can go considerably farther for considerably less cost. And $150 to only go 400 km is jaw dropping. The tank can't be that small if it costs that much to fill up, and yet you're not going that far for that price. What is it? Like a large pickup or SUV? I thought only Americans drove cars like that.

If I had the rule that I would want to stay over anywhere that was an hour away from my house, I wouldn't be able to go to work, because my commute to and from work are about an hour each. So I spend 2 hours on the road on a typical day. And I agree that does suck. It's 10 hours per week, 40 hours per month. So in the course of a typical month, I spend an entire additional week's worth of time on the road just going to and from work.

 

Same here, I guess. I live in the most southern part of the Randstad (big conurbation in The Netherlands) and usually there are quite some traffic jams a, especially when I need to go north. And there are speed limits. Also, it takes time to get to the highway and from the highway to your destination. A 50 miles drive (80km) takes me about 90 minutes, I guess, if traffic is not too bad. But then, I don't own a car so what do I know. I kinda enjoy my bike and public transportation sofar.

 

That's because American cars are huge great behemoths with massive engines. Generally.

 

And that makes us want to drive more and and get more miles out of a tank of gas? I drive a freakin Honda Accord - there have been millions of them sold world wide. And a lot of Americans drive smaller vehicles too. (Yes, we probably have a higher percentage of pickup and SUV owners than anywhere else, but it's not like every other household owns one.)

Maybe Americans and Canadians have a different view of driving to places because we've been conditioned to do so. Things are a lot more spread out here. Every year, I vacation in North Carolina, and it entails about a 6 hour ride. It's far, but not horrendously far. But a trip of that distance (about 400 miles (650 km), would place many people in other countries outside of their country. Especially if you live in someplace like England or New Zealand, where a trip that distance would place you in the ocean.

 

I remember being shocked at the cavalier attitude to distance Americans seemed to have when I was over. An hour's longer drive to get to a slightly different cinema no biggy, two hours to get to a mall with a slightly different variety of shops no problem. Heck my mom lives 40 minutes away and I deem it too far to drive except for big things like Christmas and whatnot.

 

Another great example here I just remembered. I dated a girl a while back when I was in university who lived 100 km away. One of us would make the trip each weekend to see the other. Granted it did seem a bit of a distance, but it still didn't feel like it was too far.

We kept that up for about a year and a half until I realized she was a total nutjob

 

No, the tanks are bigger hence a bigger capacity, and petrol is cheaper, hence a cheaper full tank. American cars definitely aren't economical, just huge and fuel is cheap.

Petrol prices in the UK are absolutely ridiculous. I pay £1.40 (over $2) per LITRE of fuel. Sometimes more. Most of that is tax.

 

No argument about the prices. We pay about $4 per gallon, which is about 3.8 litres, so the price comparison isn't even close.

But I seriously doubt that my Accord has a bigger gas tank just because it's sold in the US. It's a 14 gallon tank (this is my assumption - I can be arsed to look in the owners manual - because I've never had to put more than 13.5 gallons in it, even when my fuel gauge was on E). 14 gallons is about the size of tanks on most mid-sized cars here, and the 30 miles per gallon is also about standard for a medium sized car. (I don't have any idea what the manual states for mpg either - but I do know I can go about 400 miles on a tank of gas, and if that's 14 gallons worth, well... that's about 30 mpg.) It's only the hulking SUVs that have 20+ gallon tanks on them, and they need them because they typically get less than 20 miles to a gallon.

 

What happened to the Canada thread? This has become the "What is your Mileage" thread.
Lets get back to talking about moose and beavers and toques and bad Canadian TV shows like, The Littlest Hobo


Hey here is an important piece of Canadian history. Is anyone outside of Canada familiar with the Trudeau Salute? I actually thought he gave it originally to the opposing party but it was actually protesters. Still, you gotta love Pierre Trudeau.