Diablevert

Sweet vindication

Regarding my post below, the other day I was on the Luas. Now, my stop is near the Microsoft campus, where they have their European headquarters. Meaning that techsupport for the practically everywhere in the EU is in there, and conversations on the train home come in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, you name it. Or, more amusingly, in mildy stilted English, as people try and get to know their co-workers. There's a lot of awkward explaining going on, as the the flirty Italian dude tries to put into English a Blaise Pascal quote in a manner recognizable to the cute French chick, and she in turn asks him about why is the deal with the rivalry between the North and the South in Italy, because her sister dated this Sicilian guy once...

So I'm sitting there the other day, and these two German guys get on, talking to this girl, one of these little getting-to-know-you, where-do-you-live, complaining-about-Dublin conversations. The girl looked a bit like Jennifer Love-Hewitt without the mega-boobs --- petite, brunette, perky. Her accent I couldn't quite place --- If I'd have had to guess, I'd have said Upper Midwest, maybe Michgan. A bit nasal.Can you imagine someone saying, "What you need to do? Okay. You need to not..." The tone you're hearing in your head, that was her.

She turned every sentence into a question, and the questions into I don't quite know what. "So you don't want to live in the city center? Is it the bust-le?" She talke about how "she was really into, like, PDAs?" Wagging her fingers into air-quotes: "You know? Public. Displays. Of Affection?" Waggle-waggle.

I writhed in my seat, thinking: "Ohmigod. Dude. You're such a tool."

And then? And then, my friends? It turned out she was Canadien.

Oh, that was sweet.

Also apparently Toronto is just like New York only like, clean, and nice, and friendly, and Vancouver is the Garden of Eden. And whereas the United States is a melting pot, Canada is a cultural mosaic.

And yes, she actually said that out loud.