Hotel Canada

If you have a baby, you can check out of Canada anytime you like, but you can never leave. Let's say you want to take the baby to visit your mother in the States, but your husband is working and can't come. In order for you to be able to leave the country without him, he must write a letter giving you permission, and it must be notarized. (The letter is only good for that particular trip.)

If you give birth in Canada, things are even more complicated. Obviously, you have to get your baby a passport, and there are all kinds of rules for this process. As I wrote in a previous post, passport photos are subject to all kinds of specifications. Also, you need to have known a Canadian for two years or more, and this Canadian must sign your child's passport application. (It used to be that the guarantor had to be a member of an approved profession.) But what happens if you are visiting Canada for the first time and give birth? Do you have to stay in the country with your baby for two years?

Last week, my husband and I had passport photos taken for our new baby. "We do them in black and white," explained the photographer, "because sometimes they are rejected if the person's coloring is different, like, if they have a sunburn or something." (There is no danger of our baby getting a sunburn in the middle of a Winnipeg winter, but whatever.) We then went over to the passport office. We produced the application and photos, and I lifted the baby out of the Bjorn so that the clerk could see him and ascertain that he was the baby in the photo.

No dice. Apparently, the Canadian who signed our passport application also was required to write "I certify this to be a true likeness of (name)" on one of the passport photos (as well as sign and date it). It wasn't enough that we had the baby with us, who was obviously the subject of the photos.

Club Fantasy

This place was voted one of the top five strip clubs in Winnipeg, because it had a shower in the middle of the room. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view), it is now closed (like many places in Winnipeg, including Gluttons, which many considered the best restaurant).

What I'm wondering is, did they reenact fantasies of, say, permanently escaping Winnipeg? How much would that cost?

Male Strippers Wanted

It's not just single male oenophiles that Winnipeg lacks; apparently, the city also could use some more male strippers.

That "blizzard" NYC is having...

...is just every winter day in Winnipeg!

A Food Post

There are hundreds of NYC-based food blogs, but I've only managed to find three based in Winnipeg: Winnipeg Eats, Savour Winnipeg, and Karen Food. To be honest, I haven't found that much food worth blogging about in Winnipeg, but I'll write at least one post about it.

• Food Delivery. In NYC, the local food delivery service is SeamlessWeb. Many offices use it to order lunch. In Winnipeg, there is Mobile Maitre'D. I was hungry for lunch the other day, so I called the service - and got a recording saying that if you want to order lunch, you have to do it 24 hours in advance.

• The Grocery. Mayor Bloomberg has been banning trans fats from NYC groceries, and he's also been on an anti-salt crusade. In Winnipeg, you'll find trans fats in everything from pie crusts to, probably, donuts (someone should call Tim Horton's to ask about that), and foods processed for Canadians apparently have a higher sodium content than for Americans, even when they are produced by the same companies. (So if I don't have a heart attack falling on the ice, that frozen dinner is gonna get me. Speaking of which - why doesn't Winnipeg shovel off its snow-covered sidewalks? Only the roads get shoveled.)
  

• Local Specialties. It's hard to say what the local specialty is in NYC, because there's such great food of all kinds. Winnipeg has a large Ukrainian population, so you can find pierogies everywhere.
  

I got in a rather interesting discussion about foods Canadians like that you can't find in the U.S. I'm not sure these are any great loss, but here they are: 1) "Ketchup Chips"; and 2) "Keel." "What is keel?" I asked a Winnipegger. "Well in the U.S., when you order a bucket of fried chicken, they don't even put in the keel. But in Canada it's the most expensive part. It's the part of the chicken closest to the ass." I knew there was something very wrong about this answer, so I Googled, and the Winnipegger was wrong... the keel is the cartilagey bit between the breasts of the chicken. Still sounds pretty damn unappetizing.