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The American Triangles in bold,
The Bermuda triangle, centre.
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This post comes after my one month trip to North America. (you may know it as 'North Ameriga' in some parts of Southern India and 'North Umreeka' in the north.) There are basically two types of America, North America and South America. There is also Central America but no one really cares unless there is a major earthquake which is when people discover countries that they have never known before. (They don't even seem to be playing good cricket any more.) The North America and South America are basically triangles on the map, not to be confused with the Bermuda triangle which is just a fictional character from conspiracy theory movies. North America is where most of the shows you watch on TV, Hollywood movies, all the big industries, over 17 trillion $ of GDP, major environmental destruction, etc. come from, and South America is where they ride llamas and play football. After having visited almost every major city in the North America (Montreal, Quebec and Mountain View, California to be precise), I present to you all the information I have gathered so that it can help you when you are in North America and you are sad, so that you can laugh with it.
The first thing I noticed about the North American people is that they tend to do everything the opposite way as us, on purpose. We use the metric system, they use the imperial system. We drive on the left side of the road, they ride on the wrong (right) side of the road. Even the steering wheel is manufactured wrongly. Since everyone drives wrong, the double negation somehow results in neutral safe roads. When everyone plays cricket or football, they play their own "football" which has nothing to do with the foot or the ball, just a bunch of people wrestling on a big field. When we go to sleep, they wake up to work and when we go to work, they go to sleep. With a low population density and an absence of manual labour, They lack the people to do most jobs and hence import people from other countries like Mexico, China and India. A lack of bus/train drivers has forced a poor public transport system resulting in everyone driving their own cars. A lack of handymen makes people rely more on machines. Since life is so precious, everyone (including little children) gets to carry a gun to protect himself. The lack of parents makes children grow up by themselves, often turning into thugs. There aren't enough people to put spices in the food, and hence the food there is tasteless (or at least that is what I think is the reason why food sucks). Montreal is one of the cities I visited in NA and it deserves a long mention in my blog.
Montreal
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| Underground City, Montreal |
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Baby meerkats coming out of their
burrow. |
Montreal (en: Mount Royal) is a French city in the Quebec province of Canada. It was founded at around 1000AD when the Norse Vikings discovered Newfoundland and built settlements replacing the Intuit Igloos. The English and the French created Montreal as it is today. Montreal is considered to be similar to New York - it has centralized water purification and distribution system, an underground metro rail connecting various parts of the city, a centralized Air Conditioning system for the entire city. Unfortunately the centralized AC knob is broken with the temperature is set to some negative value and hence the city is always at sub-zero temperatures. To beat the cold, the people have taken up the task of building an
underground city similar to rat holes. People stay in their holes all winter and come out of their rat holes only when they feel the heat again.
In Montreal, they have a rule saying exactly 1% of the budget for every building that is constructed should be spent on art. The result of the rule can be clearly seen in the following images.
One can see art everywhere almost everywhere, inside the buildings, on buildings, in front of buildings, as support for buildings, in metro stations. Montrealites are so obsessed with art that when a piece of the Berlin wall that was gifted to Canada in 1990, it was found
vandalized converted into art the next day as can be seen in the picture.
This obsession for art did come at a price. During the Olympics of 1976, a stadium was constructed in the city for the games to happen and as you see in the picture, it happens to be the biggest inclined tower in the world. This magnificent structure was so beautiful that people considered the entire structure to be one massive chunk of art. Since exactly 1% had to be spent on art and that happened to be the price of the entire building, they ended up spending 100 times more to fix all the records with the builders and went bankrupt right after the olympics. As an effect, the next year New York was no longer considered a sister city of Montreal. I will conclude my post on Montreal with a positive note. Going bankrupt also had its own advantages over New York. Since people have no money, the crime rate is very low as there is no point trying to rob a poor man.
- Kashyap Puranik, combining facts and fiction since 2008.
