Those Wild and Crazy Canucks...

We hosted a pair of Canadians over the weekend before last, actually the nights of Sunday and Monday. There had been a miscommunication about the night of Saturday...

Freeloaders.com is the site that Corrie has us associated with, but there are many similar Internet-organizations out there that specialize in linking up travelers with possible places to stay for free. Since our travel budget has shrunk considerably, or at least it has shrunk past the point of traveling to places we can't already stay for free, it didn't seem like we even needed to be associated with it. But Corrie, being the hospitable person she is, left us on the list of possible 'destinations.' We thought if our schedules permitted, then we might take on someone from elsewhere wanting to stay, in a gesture that would karmactically help us out over time. We didn't lack for requests...people seemed to think of all New York City as all some romantic idea of Manhattan, large buildings, apartments close to subways, and the Empire State Building in view always. People can't comprehend that when we said, truthfully, on our profile for Freeloaders that while we live 'close' to Manhattan (in the broad terms of the five-borough's unique sense of geometry), after hours it was still almost an hour away by public transportation. This didn't deter some people to ask if they could stay for multiple weeks, and even one asked if they could stay for two months. Two months?

This wasn't a problem the Canucks had. They were pragmatic and polite, knowledgeable, educated, middle-aged and square. She was 44, and he was 52, and as little as ages matter to Corrie and I, the fact they were pretty square was probably our biggest issue.

Not drinking doesn't mean you're a square, but these two never drank. My mother, for anybody who knows her, could, supposedly, be called a few various things, but "square" is definitely not one of them.

We made conversation while we had the chances, usually about the kinds of stuff Corrie and I normally talk about (you know, boring crap like politics, literature, and cinema), and I made an effort to learn about the visceral reality of life in Ottawa, Canada's version of DC.

The couple was nice, almost boring in their regular-ness, kind of like me and Corrie being boring, just without the beer, subversive attitudes, and boisterous laughter. They liked coffee, they didn't watch television, they liked traveling...The lady did tell us some of her personal history, which is pretty personal and which I feel I shouldn't relay here, but it did help out with the two-and-a-half day picture we saw, filling in blanks and what-not.

After showers, though, the bathroom was left in a state that implied the shower curtain was a foreign mystery to them.

Here is a picture of them, the nice unmarried couple from Ottawa. It bothered Corrie they didn't offer to do the dishes after we fed them...not that we would have made them clean up, but the gesture of offering would have gone over better.