Taciturn

I'm in Canada. I have been for a couple of weeks, right now I'm in Vancouver and loving it. Tim has asked me a couple of times whether the constant cloudy weather is depressing me at all. It's not, I'm really loving it here. I guess maybe if I was living and working here I might see it differently, but as a place to come holidaying it's fantastic.

Canadians seem really nice, one thing in particular is that at an intersection, pedestrians are given right of way. I tried to be a laid-back holidayer and wait patiently for the vehicles to pass, but they always stop and wave me across.

Before Vancouver I was in Edmonton. It's not nearly as green as Vancouver, probably because it gets far less rain. The grey of the road salt seems to envelope everything, and the city is significantly littered. Still, it's very different from home. There's ice and snow on the footpaths and the whole city seems to have embraced Christmas decoration. It's beautiful by night.

I had a sandwich and iced mocha in a local coffee shop[1] today. I chose to have the ice blended in rather than as cubes — big mistake. I'm sure it would have tasted really good otherwise, though it's probably time I switched from iced coffees to hot coffees. I had a large coffee from Block 1912 in Edmonton last week and it was delicious. I had a Toasted Vegetarian sandwich with my iced gloop, it was really good. All in all it was enjoyable, so I contributed some shrapnel to the "Tipping is Sexy" jar then continued roaming the local streets.

I think I've got the travelling bug. I'm going to have to come back to Vancouver again some time.

/* PowerPC can be little or big endian.  Hopefully gcc will know...  */

— GNU C Library, <bits/endian.h>