I’ve always been told Canadians are friendly…

People have, in general, told me that they find Canadians friendly. That’s always nice to hear, because I know that even though I make lots of jokes about tourists, I normally don’t mind them and I don’t need to go out of my way to be rude to anyone. It’s not worth it.

But this guy who’s staying at the campground just. . . wow. I don’t know if he was kind of crazy or just overly friendly.

So, he comes into the store with his four kids in tow and they’re all pulling golf clubs out of the bucket. That’s fine. Then they wander around the store, with the golf clubs in tow, just looking around. Also, not a problem.

He picks up some items that he wants to buy; some swim goggles, marshmallows… his kids are all carrying around marshmallow sticks. He puts the goggles and bag of marshmallows on the counter, so I begin to ring them up.

Now my boss, when he’s here at night he likes to snack. So sitting on my side of the counter (we have a little wall thing, between us and the customer… like a tall ledge) are a bag of sunflower seeds. The guy reaches over and takes a handful, stuffing them into his mouth.

I was kind of unsure if that’s what I saw, well, it was more like disbelief. So I told myself he just had grabbed a pen or something he dropped.

He then goes over to the keychains, and picks up one that says “I [heart] NF”, and says out loud, “I LOVE NEWFOUNDLAND!”. I looked at him and corrected him, “It’s I love Niagara Falls“. But he insisted it was Newfoundland, and kept saying IT’S THE ROCK!

O_O Okay. I mean really, it could be Newfoundland. It doesn’t make any sense seeing as you’re in Niagara Falls, but hey, if you want it to be Newfoundland that’s fine by me.

He asks me where it was made. I told him I wasn’t sure and say it was probably made in China. Hhe wondered why I didn’t inspect the merchandise (jokingly). I told him that I just put it into the computer. So far, he’s paid for all his items except the keychain, I’m holiding his change. He goes over to the garbage can and starts scraping the price tag off the keychain — I haven’t rung it up yet.

He looks up at me and goes, “Doesn’t say where it was made” and then proceeds to ask me why so many things are made in China. I replied that one of the big reasons was that it was cheap labour. He seemed surprised.

He gets another one of the keychains (he bought two) and then comes to collect his change. He reaches over the counter again and grabs another fistful of sunflower seeds. I think my expression was honestly and completely, “WTF”. Then he says, “Oh I can’t get enough of these things! HAHA”.

O_O

I mean, who does that? Seriously, who does that? It’s not like they were open in front the counter for all the customers to take, they were obviously just sitting there, left over. He had no idea who they belonged to, although I’m sure he assumed they were mine. I was shocked, so I didn’t say anything about it.

They extended another night as well. He told me he was from BC, but his reservation said Alberta. That confused me, because I had no idea then why he was all NEWFOUNDLANDDDDD over the keychains.

He talked about a few other tihngs, but I don’t remember what they were. I had a hard tme understanding him too. He laughed a lot, at what I’m assuming were his own jokes.

He was a nice enough man, just totally random. I mean, to the point where I had no idea how to react.