- Three of the five restaurants in which we have eaten during our brief visit have had hockey on the television. This includes breakfast this morning at Denny’s.
- The Kwik-E-Mart where we stopped to procure snacks had Hershey’s chocolate Stanley Cups for sale. Also, hockey on the television.
- The tendrils of empire extended to the park on Saturday, where a cricket match was underway.
- An urban seashore (Victoria and suburbs) strung out with public parks between the homes of the rich. Nearly all the public parks had clean toilet facilities, and on a sunny Sunday afternoon we never had difficulty finding a parking place.
- I realize it is a cliché (and a risk of nationalistic stereotyping) to comment on Canadian politeness, but it is a reasonable explanation for this, which I thought of as a “conceptual gate”:
conceptual gate guarding steps from a Vancouver Island beach to a private home. by John Fleck, May 2013