How does being Canadian make your cruise experience different? It doesn't have a
lot of impact. I talked in our previous podcast about like currency conversion
and how that's a factor. The other challenge is there aren't a lot of
Canadian ports. Vancouver is a Carnival port technically but at most they
generally sail out of Vancouver twice a year and we're talking on the more
expensive trips the journeys cruises so we're talking Alaska and Hawaii that's a
challenge. We almost always have to travel to the port of departure one of
the questions people are asking constantly on Facebook and other
platforms is: Do you need a passport? Well as Canadians we always need a passport
because that's how we're gonna get to the American port of departure or if it
is a journeys cruise you know Alaska Hawaii it's ending in another country we
need a passport so I can't really speak to the American experience but if you're
Canadian have a passport especially if you're gonna cruise. Other than that I
mean you'll be on the cruise ship and you might encounter the odd terminology
thing. Like one thing that I noticed when I first started cruising to or when I
first are traveling to the United States at all as a Canadian when I want a Pepsi
I say you know I order a pop that's what we call it for short that's the
vernacular the colloquial - what we call it's normal
hey I'm gonna have some pop. In certain parts of the United States and it's hard
for me to determine exactly where they don't know what the hell I'm talking
about. "Soda" seems to be the global term so I'm
actually trying to shift my language and say soda more it feels funny when I say
it I feel like I'm putting on airs or fake accent or something but soda is
sort of a bit more universal. I've been told that there are parts of I believe
the South in the United States where all soda is actually called Coke which is
weird. So you'd be like "hey can I have a Coke?" "Okay what kind of Coke?" A Pepsi or
like "Hey do you have Coke?" "Sure what do you want?" "I want a Mountain Dew." I
haven't encountered that personally but I've heard stories so that's one of the like
little language things that can come up. Generally speaking as a Canadian I'm not
like branded as having a funny accent like once or twice someone thought I was
Australian for some reason I can't explain that
but by and large I think the Canadian accent is a lot like an American accent
when I think you know Vancouver sounds like Seattle I imagine so that doesn't
really come up there's the odd time that there's jokes or other things in the
comedy club that are a little outside the Canadian frame of reference so like
we talked about before in the podcast that they were joking about the Section
8 cruise you know the actually the cruise I'm about to take is that kind
the four-day sail that just goes to Mexico it took us a while from like we
had to figure out what section eight was through context and like later when we
got Wi-Fi were you wikied it and stuff and it's about I think subsidized
housing or something so there's the odd specific american term that is kinda
specific to their experience but that comes up very rarely it's really it's
really not often that it happens and it's never a barrier to anything so I
don't know that's that's sort of the the the gist of it mainly as a Canadian it
doesn't you know in the comedy club that'll be like anybody here from you
know Texas or Kentucky and stuff and Canada often gets left out of that or if
it is Canadian you scream all that much louder and you see the other ones and
you know it's always noteworthy and stuff but I don't know that's about it I
had an odd experience in Texas where I was taking a shuttle from the airport
and there was a woman who was advocating for a certain political person running
for president at the time in the primaries in the Republican primaries
that she was trying to convince us to vote for and we were trying to tell her
we were Canadian and she still was like "Well you've got to support this person" and one of
her points was like oh you know because the Canadian health care system is an
absolute mess which is just not true it's not my experience not my family's
experience I don't know people who've had that experience it's not perfect
sometimes we're kept waiting to see a doctor a little bit longer than we would
like but other than that you know and one of the examples I point to is my
mother basically be cancer inside of a year and so she was pushing really hard
saying oh well your health care is a mess and we're like no one's really not
and she's like yes it is and I was like well my mom beat cancer in a year and it
didn't cost her a penny so from my experience it's okay she says no that
didn't happen I'm like do you think I'm lying she goes no you're confused you
don't know what happened that's not what happened I'm like do you know my mother
are you and my mother in cahoots like trying to convince me something happened that
didn't happen? Like that doesn't seem to make sense to me so there's that odd
thing where you know there's there's certain things that in the political
sphere have been said about Canada that like are just crazy but I encountered
the healthcare myth more than I do the everyone lives in igloos thing
that like was probably more common like in the 80s or something so from the
Canadian perspective one interesting thing though is online it doesn't seem
like there's a lot of Canadian cruisers active on things like Facebook and
Cruise Critic that's one thing I've noticed largely Americans I actually
started a Facebook group called Canadian Carnival Cruisers and other than my
friends and family nobody seems to have joined whereas you know all other
sorts of groups huge you know you can start a a Texas group or a Florida group
or whatever and you know tons of people signing up all the time start one for
the entirety of Canada there's crickets so I think that maybe we're just a
little less active online, a less vocal perhaps I mean Canada has one
tenth of the US's population so that's gonna be a factor in these sorts
of things but you know other than that kind of stuff there's not a lot about
the Canadian experience that's different. I think it's really about the traveling
to the port is really the big thing because it's never we just drove to the
cruise port and went or you know we took twelve sailings a year because it's out
of our backyard. We don't get that experience but other than that I don't
know it's not it's not that different if you enjoyed this clip please subscribe
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