Talking to a 14-year-old about Canadians and Americans

Girl: There’s this boy in my class. He’s SUCH a jerk!  All he talks about it how great it is in America and how lousy Canada is.  He even said he was going to do a class report on how much better the USA is than Canada.

Me: He must have been joking about that part.

I guess so.

–Does he know you’re also Canadian?

Of course!

–He’s just trying to get a rise out of you.

I know.

–Has he even been to the States?

Probably.  Yeah, I think they went to Florida on vacation.

–Florida!  They probably saw more Canadians there than Americans.  They all come down to escape the winter.

Girl laughs.

–You know, when I was a kid in Britannia Beach we had American families living among us.  The mine was owned by Americans.  Some of their kids would brag to us all the time about how great it was down in the States.  We used to roll our eyes every time and then talk about them later.

Laughs again.

–Americans are always shooting their mouths off about something, but Canadians don’t like it when people brag.  Actually, it used to be that way, but now I’m not so sure.  Last time I was in British Columbia I noticed how they now put The Best Place on Earth as a slogan on their license plates.   Canadians always used to be so modest, and now they’re trying to tell everyone that BC’s the best place on earth?   I mean, when you know you’ve got something special, you don’t go around bragging about it.  That’s the way we grew up, anyway.

Looks like that queer expatriate’s on the prowl again

… and he’s definitely found what he was looking for.

The arrangement of those letters looks too good to be left up to chance, Adam.    You should have left a note tucked under the windshield wiper.

He says if he were any less classy, he’d have returned with a screwdriver, but there are other ways to get your hands on your very own COCK99, Adam.  You can order a German license plate and have it delivered anywhere in the world from customgermanplates.com.

The blurb at the bottom half of that page has some good background reading on the German license plate.  For example, did you  know that:

Car owners can personalise their plates by choosing certain numbers or letters instead of the random ones at the end. For example, people living in the town of Pirna might choose PIR-AT 77, “Pirat” being the German for “pirate”; another favourite is BAR-BQ 777 for Barnim. Various combinations that could be considered politically unacceptable — mainly due to implications relating to Nazi Germany — are disallowed or otherwise avoided. The district Sächsische Schweiz uses the name of its main town, Pirna, in its code PIR, to avoid the use of SS, the name of the paramilitary organisation; similarly SA is also avoided. In 2004 in Nuremberg, a car owner was refused a number plate beginning N-PD because of the connection to the extreme right-wing political party, the NPD.

It kind of bothered me at first that the letters for plates around Hamburg are HH, which could very well stand for Heil Hitler instead of Hansestadt Hamburg, a reference to the city’s historical membership in the Hanseatic League of trading states.

Germans are also fond of making fun of the abbreviations, and around Hamburg there’s a little local rivalry.  Pinneberg, a suburb northwest of Hamburg, has the initials PI.  Hamburg drivers call them Provincial Idiots.  The Pinnebergers turn around call us Halbes Hirn, or half-brains.

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