So much of what you find in any metropolitan area in North America is the same: the same big box stores, fast food restaurants, and so forth. So much of Calgary seems very familiar. You walk into a Staples and it's pretty much like the Staples down the street from us in Toronto was (only smaller).

What we really enjoy, therefore, is accumulating new evidence that we are, we really are, living somewhere different. This took place yesterday when we went out (as it happened) to go to Staples but found it had closed early due to the holiday. But as we sat in the parking lot before drivng away, there stood before us on the grassy area by the road...a gopher! This, of course, would be utterly mundane to a Calgary native--like people back east spotting a squirrel. But to us, this was very cool. (As this story indicates, however, farmers don't see them at all as cool.)

Anyhow, leaving the parking lot yesterday evening we began to find a number of other pieces of evidence we were living "somewhere else." It still being fairly bright outside (at 6:30) we decided we'd finally explore the southwest part of the city--the part everybody says is the nicest. We zoomed south on Deerfoot Trail then west onto Glenmore Trail (they like calling their highways "trails" and we wondered if they once really were trails). We ended up at the huge Glenmore Reservoir park, with a "natural environment" area up against its western end. The landscape around here, I should mention, looks different from the landscape in the east. Because there's so little rain, the basic background color is brown. Only certain things grow here and the nice neighborhood we drove through down there tended to have lovely, huge conifers in front instead of deciduous trees.

Anyhow, after leaving the park we looped around the neighborhood near the reservoir and ended up (following our map) on the western edge of the city. "Hmmm, this road looks interesting--leaving town and going through this huge empty area, then ending up back in the city, further south," we said. The road, which we began to follow, took us straight onto Indian land (the name of some tribe or other shows up on the map) and it was rough. Gravelly, rolling, and empty, with very few people--just scruffy wild land and a curving, half-frozen river. Off to the west were the mountains, looking surreal with alternate sunshine and purply snow clouds creating various lovely images. Once and a while we'd pass a sort of farmhouse with beat-up pick-ups or SUVs in front, and also the odd pick-up would come flying towards us with Indian-looking folks inside. It all looked very poor after wealthy Calgary and reminded us of all the news stories about problems on Canada's Indian reserves.

After what seemed quite a while bumping along the road and figuring out where we were, we got back to Calgary city limits and its smooth, fancy highways. We drove through areas with new developments--townhouses, stacked condos, etc.--and I understood what people meant by saying the southwest quadrant is nicest. However, it's also more crowded and all in all I was pretty happy to return to our home in the unfashionable Northeast.