The Big Trip: Vancouver, B.C.

I've been up here for a few days now, just disinclined to post. Vancouver is beautiful, the weather is beautiful, people are being reasonably nice.

I read an op-ed in a local newspaper that claimed the really nasty anti-American stuff coming out of Canada is actually not by Canadians, it's by American ex-pats living in Canada. Americans have been emigrating to Canada for a long time, particularly during Vietnam (my own socialist family moved up to Canada after the war), and then the numbers surged again after the 2000 and 2004 elections. Some of these are hardcore lefty America-hater types who infiltrate Canadian public education and the media and spew their vitriol from across the border, and it turns out Canadians are not too happy about it.

Speaking of emigration/immigration, while I've been gone my almost ex-Finnish husband received his citizenship interview date (September), and is excited. What is kind of strange about this is that the USCIS (née INS) website claims they've got a backlog of citizenship applications and are only just now processing applications from October 2006. We submitted his application in May 2007. Maybe there's a quota by nationality. We checked one year and the total number of Finns who had immigrated to the U.S. was 19, so who knows.

Yesterday I decided to drive down to Tsawwassen, B.C., which is laid back and has pretty beaches (except it was low-tide and kinda smelly). I have a whole day and gorgeous weather, so I think I'll hit the road again today. Been thinking about driving up to Hope, which is where a famous predecessor to a movie that inspired the kooks at VPC was filmed.