I saw this car on Robson. Only on Robson.
It used to be called Robsonstrasse, because there were so many Germans around, and so many fine German restaurants, if there really is such a thing. Then it turned into funky little boutiques. Now it's nothing more than an open-air shopping mall with decent restaurants. No Germans. Where did they go? We just disappeared.
My mother and I do this German thing. It's weird, because there's nothing really German about us, except for some vague family history. You can find birth records, christenings, marriages, deaths for everyone and trace them all back to Europe, and that's where it ends. Try as you might, you can never find the people that were around before the ones you knew that came to Canada.
I don't think you're really supposed to be able to find them. People came here to disappear, to reinvent themselves.
They did a great job, because Canada is all I've ever known. We've all been completely uprooted from Europe and yet we do this German thing, as if we can't quite bring ourselves to do something Canadian, or even worse, there isn't really a Canadian thing to be done. It's weird.
I'm sure I had something meaningful to say, but words escape me.
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