I had the misfortune of being volunteered to make a delivery for work last Sunday. For most people this would mean driving to FedEx or whatever, but for me it involves taking a last-minute flight to Montreal. This does not make for a good Sunday afternoon, especially when the weather is bad and all of your flights get canceled or delayed. Long (read: boring) story short, I ended up sitting in O'Hare with a number of Canadians headed back up to Montreal. Our neighbors to the north are a little bit off.

There was one group wearing Canada track jackets and red and white sweatpants like time sort of yukon mafia, except that they also had mesh cowboy hats with red bands also festooned with the name of the homeland. Is there a Canadian ultranationalist party that I am unaware of? A tragically unfashionable Canadian ultranationalist party? Unless they were headed off to the olympics, there's really no excuse for that sort of thing.

Next to them was a group of kids that looked like they were Boy Scouts, but if the boy scouts were co-ed and run by Greenpeace. They were reverse Hitler youth. Every one of them had a straw hat and a brightly colored bandanna around their neck. They were so almost comically diverse that they looked like a Benetton ad, just with more misguided political consciousness. Eery last one of them will take acid in the next 5 years then grow up to be an investment banker but still post on the Canadian equivalent of Daily Kos.

Finally, there was a group of very well-dressed deaf people gesticulating wildly at each other. They weren't that weird on their own, it was mostly just the cumulative effect.

In sum, as an American, I've never felt more normal in my life.

Tags: Travel, Weird