Now that I’ve been here for something like 30 hours, there are a few things I’ve noticed about Ottawa that are different from Summerside, Prince Edward Island. They aren’t exactly pros and cons, they’re just things that have stood out since I’ve been here. Not so much culture shock, as I’ve spent a week here and a week in Toronto before now, and there are things I knew to expect. Just interesting things to note.

• There are bike lanes on most of the large streets I’ve seen so far. Without exception, there have been people walking, running, and biking literally everywhere. No one is worried about their safety, they’re just out for some exercise. There are also paths set aside for walking and such, in parks, near an experimental farm nearby.
• In any public place, chances are pretty good that at least one conversation in both french and chinese will be happening withing hearing range of you. I’ve also seen several women in burkas. Here’s the thing - where I grew up, there were fewer non-white people than there are individual cultures in Ottawa. Like, we had, perhaps, twenty to thirty non-white people in our city of 14,000. That’s not to be rude, or racist, or anything like that. That’s just how it was. Here, there are people from likely every country in the world. It was rare to hear a conversation purely in french in Summerside. Generally it was tourists.
• It’s very clean, and certainly extremely modern. Again, this should be no surprise, but the difference from what I’m used to is pretty striking. We passed a building dedicated to “geophysics,” which previously was something I didn’t know even existed. It’s just a change from places where nobody paid much attention to looking shiny and new because it’s not like they had competitors lololol. If you offered a service, it was probably just you unless they wanted to go out of their way. You just did what you had to do for the most part.

Ok I had more to say but I forgot because I started trying to plan stuff out. We found a comic book/board games/card games shop nearby, and an anime shop in the same little plaza thing. That’s pretty cool. I purchased All You Need Is Kill which is about a guy fighting an impossible battle against an alien swarm, but being reborn repeatedly and slowly getting better and better each time. I also purchased Harmony (I think that was the title) about some future Utopia in which no one wants or needs for anything and some people try to kill themselves by starvation and simply aren’t allowed to do so. It seems really awesome and interesting and when I’m done reading it I’ll recommend it if it’s worth reading.