Take My Money, Please

Another day, another country. You know how it is when you’re indecisive. Just flying aimlessly around the world. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?
So I’m currently in Canada. Toronto. T-Dot, as the locals say. I arrived around midnight on Sunday and by 9am the next morning I had already been hustled. As most people who know me are aware, getting money out of me is like getting ice from the freezer. It requires a minimal amount of effort. In every country I’ve been to there has been some (ridiculous) case of me getting duped for money. It’s not that I’m stupid. I’m fully aware I’m getting swindled. I just have an inability to say no. To me losing my money isn’t as bad as being impolite. So I was walking down the street in search of a Mac store, as I’d left my laptop charger at Suzanne and Alice’s place, and this guy comes up and starts giving me this story about how he’d hooked up with some girl last night and she’d run off with his wallet and he needed to get a bus back to some town up north in order to see his kids. It was complete bullshit. I mean, the guy was pretty ugly, there’s no way he was hooking up with anyone. And even if he did have kids, he didn’t seem like the kind of guy that would actually go out of his way to see them. But I played along, there wasn’t really much else I could do, the guy had the Star Of David tattooed on his neck. And even though I have no German roots (unless you count back to when the Angles met the Saxons), I still felt compelled to give him $10.
I was a little upset by this incident as I had envisaged Canada to be like America but without any of the bad shit. In fact, isn’t that the Canadian Tourist Board’s new slogan: “Canada – America without any of the bad shit”?
Anyway, so to sooth myself I went and bought the 5th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm and spent the rest of the day in my hotel room watching that (it’s so good!!). Oh and I also bought a new charger. Which leads me to the one thing I hate about Canada already – paying GST at the till. This is the single most fucking ridiculous thing I’ve ever come across in my entire life ever! What’s the fucking point in labelling something one price on the shelf and then being charged a completely different price when you go and pay for it? It’s so amazingly absurd. I had to really restrain myself to not tell the poor girl serving me at the DVD store all about it. What if you only had a limited amount of money to feed your starving family, how are you meant to calculate how much food you can buy? HOW!?!?! If anyone wants to explain to me the benefits of not incorporating the GST into the price then please write to me. I’d love to know.
Today I went and purchased a bus ticket to Montreal. I think it’s the place for me. I had actually been far more interested in the place than Stockholm, but, I guess, it didn’t seem obscure enough for this little elitist. Anyway, I’m getting a Greyhound there, which I’m extremely excited about. It’s a 7 hour trip which is fantastic. Buses and books are the only two ways I like to experience a place (obviously, this is completely false, but I’m just trying to express a bit of individuality away from being a standard tourist type).
I’m hoping once I get to Montreal I can start meeting people and getting into some wild and crazy adventures. The highlight of my trip so far as been, whilst transiting in Detroit, seeing a police-cop using one of those things that GOB rides on Arrested Development (actually, that is going to take some beating). I'm really doing nothing at the moment as I'm trying not to spend money. And it's too sunny to go outside. The place where I'm staying had wireless, but I can't pick it up in my room, so I have to sit out in the hallway. And it's frustratingly slow.

To be continued.