Speaking of Canada (as I was in yesterday's post), we spent some time in Quebec a couple weeks ago. We had never been to that province before, so it was interesting to see just how foreign a country Canada could be.
We have been to Canada many, many times over the years, and it has certainly never seemed like a very foreign place. In Ontario, where we usually end up, everyone speaks English, they drive on the proper side of the road, and so forth.
Quebec is a whole different land. Every thing there is French. Their fries... the way they braid their hair... their toast... their maids... the way they kiss... etc. There were very, very few places that even had English captions for things.
On our first night, in Saint-Georges, I was assigned the task of locating and procuring a pizza to bring back to the hotel. Several hours later I returned with a llama and two bars of soap, and I was fresh out of pelt. It was that kind of night.
Anyway... it was interesting to introduce Little Smoot to this new culture. As soon as we crossed the border (which wasn't paved -- honest), we got to switch our car's speedometer over to metric. Little Smoot was amused to see that we were able to travel over 100 somethings-per-hour.
Seeing her interest in the metric system, I couldn't help but take the opportunity to convince her that there was such a thing as "Canadian Metric Time." I told her that Canada runs on a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour. She's not usually tremendously gullible, but she actually did believe that one and wanted me to switch the clock in the car to reflect it.
Mrs. Smoot wouldn't let me take this one too far, figuring that she'd end up bringing it up in school or some such thing, and she'd be scarred for life. I'd write more about this, but it's almost 17:72 o'clockometer already.
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Some areas have stayed with the old British system of time keeping, while others (western provinces... there's no one out there anyhow) have fully adopted the metric, or chronos, based time system.
Here's a breakdown of how it works:
Chrono is the base unit, similar to an hour. the day or Sol, is broken down into two half days, keeping the traditional AM/PM that we know so well.
The chrono is then further broken down into 100 decicronos, (think minutes) which each have 100 millicronos, (think seconds)
Larger time segments are broken down as such:
Months are now reduced to 10, known as Monaats,
And a Canadian year is called an eclyptic.
I love this part:
"Every thing there is French. Their fries... the way they braid their hair... their toast... their maids... the way they kiss... etc."
You kill as usual!
Glad you enjoyed it, Toni... and I'm very grateful to Hubert for the authoritative breakdown from an actual Canadian!
. . . and here I always thought Canadian months were known as "momeraths".
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