Discovering other cultures forces you to look at your own people, and compare… And when I compare Québec to the rest of the world, it seems we are very confused and/or confusing people…

First, we are the (almost) only people speaking French in all North America. Of course there are other French speakers around, but we are the only concentration of people living in French in that big Anglophone continent.

About half of us want to separate from Canada and have our own country. The other half don’t want to lose the Rocky Mountains they’ll never see in this lifetime…. So what do we want? Mehh… Not sure yet!

But where we’ve really given our best shot at being confusing, is with our use of both metric AND imperial systems. Yes, we use both, depending on what we need to measure.

Examples? Sure… We use Celsius degrees when it comes to weather. But if you go for a swim, water temperature is almost always in Fahrenheit… Body temperature? Celsius! Of course… But when it comes to cooking, I couldn’t tell you how hot 350 Fahrenheit is in Celsius, still, it does the trick for most of my meat dishes.

Speaking of cooking, anything’s possible in the kitchen… Cups, table spoons, tea spoons, milliliters, ounces, kilos, and grams… Your pick, let yourself loose!

Now, you think, what about lengths or distances? Do we use meters and kilometers, or inches, feet and miles? Well again, it depends. We measure most things in metric. But not ourselves. I am 5’4″, don’t ask me how much that makes in meters.

How about weight, right? Although it would be more flattering to use kilos, cutting the number approximately in half, we are used to it in pounds. For most other things, we stick to kilos and grams.

And here is the cherry on the cake; la crême de la crême! In Québec, we don’t use miles to measure the distance from A to B… Kilometers? That would have been a good idea, if you asked me, especially for foreigners visiting. But no. We use time.  /o\

In Québec, if you ask someone how far one place is from another, without specifically asking for the mileage (oh yeah, we say mileage, even if we use kilometers), you will get an answer like;

• Trois-Rivières? If you’re lucky with the traffic getting out of Montréal, it is about an hour, an hour and fifteen minutes from here!

Not confused?? You’ve been reading nothedane56 in my back, haven’t you? Practicing your tolerance to confusion level? Well, let me put it this way…  He writes dang good fiction bemusement, but my stuff is 100% real!