Listening to Americans

For all the Canadian readers of this blog I'm certain that you all remember talking to Americans, a brilliant bit of comedy done by Rick Mercer as part of "This Hours has 22 Minutes". Well it turns out that sometimes you don't even have to talk to them, just listening to them can be comedy enough.

Yesterday somehow I got on the topic of Canadian currency with a couple of my colleagues, one American (I believe that she's from the mid-west) and the other guy is Honduran, but has lived her for a number of years. Well it got to the point of explaining the dollar coins, and why the toonie does not have loons on it but rather polar bears. At this point the girl piped up "But you don't even have polar bears in Canada." (then again why would be tucked way down there? - a little Simpson's quote for the fun of it). Unfortunately I was a bit too shocked by this statement to respond very diplomatically, I believe that my exact words were "For christ-sake, we own the North Pole." Though I was almost laughing as I said it, so hopefully it didn't come across as being mean.

Who knows, perhaps years of tricking Americans into believing things that aren't true they have finally become skeptical of us...or more likely they just don't know.