I'm visiting my sister in Seattle for while, and the part of town where she lives is pretty sketchy. We walked to the ocean today and she warned me that drivers are prone to honk and/or yell things at girls walking on the street. It was about 2 1/2 hours total of walking and we counted 4 "hey baby"s, 15 honks, and one scary looking guy leaning against his car invited me into his house to "kick it" for a while. Maybe he has an armadillo. Thankfully what Seattle appears to lack in polite, well-mannered citizenry it makes up for with beautiful ocean and mountains.
I took the bus here, a sweet 3-day bus ride across Canada. There is still snow on the ground in some parts of Saskatchewan, which was surprising. The bus stopped pretty much every two hours, and it was kind of sad because fully 1/2 to 2/3 of the bus would get out every time to smoke. There was even a young pregnant girl among them, which was rather... what's the opposite of heartwarming?
I stayed in Victoria for a couple of days. It's pretty much my favourite place now. I stayed with my friend Laura who had all sorts of crazy stories about all of the interesting people who live there. Apparently Victoria has a big underground satanist population and they perform many ceremonies in the parks. It also has a substantial hippie population, and she has developed an extreme aversion to all things pertaining to hippies. She had a friend who, last time she saw her, was running a fairly successful business, and out of the blue she showed up at her door with a daughter, both of them shoeless and dirty, and asked to stay for a few days. They ended up staying for a month, eating all her food and inviting strange hairy men into her apartment. She would leave food to rot in various places, and then try to clean it up with tea tree and hemp oil, which only exacerbated the smell. She was raising her daughter as a vegan, even though she wasn't even a vegetarian herself, and would cut up meat and cheese in front of the little girl and refuse to give it to her when she asked. It sounded pretty crazy.
Also, I saw this in a shop window. It made me supremely happy.