Americans vs. Yanks

As I said earlier today I was going over to Buffalo with my sister for a meeting... Actually it was in Niagara Falls New York...but blah who cares...LOL

Anyway....

I grew up in a small part of a town called Fort Erie... it is a town that is right across the Niagara River from Buffalo... Where I lived was pretty much nothing but cottages... there were very few actual Canadians that lived in my area... the cottages were pretty much owned by Americans that would only come and live there in the summer...

I grew up disliking Americans, and would call them "Yanks", didn't matter where they were from they were all Yanks... I disliked them because every summer they would come into my quiet little area of the world...mostly from New York and Florida... the would unpack their brand new cars and SUV's, their children would run around hollering all the time... they would throw big parties til the wee hours of the mornings and it just seemed like whenever the yanks came back they brought all the noise with them...

I would go to the beach in the summer (which was literally across the road) and see all these yanks lying around on the beach, garbage strewn all over the place, kids and dogs running around kicking up sand at everyone they ran by, they would drive too fast down the little roads... they were never polite... alwasy seemed to be yelling... when they moved back into town they all thought they owned the place... I hated them...

I wanted to move out of there as fast as possible just to get away from the yanks that came every year...

When I did finally move... I moved to St Catharines... where I met a group of friends that I hung out with a lot of the time... a few of them would ask me where I was from... they were surprised to hear that I wasn't an American... they said that I had an american accent... I found out that two very good friends of mine were actually from the states... one spent most of her life in Texas (she was a military brat...moved around a lot) and the other was from Pensylvania... I said "Oh so you're yanks?"... well that was the day I got my first lesson in Yanks vs. Southerners...

When I started chatting online most of the people I came across were American... I stayed open minded and tried not to judge because I didn't think it was fair to dislike them just because of where they came from...

Over the past couple of years I've come to love the Americans that I have become very close too... and I realized that there is a difference between Americans and Yanks...

Yanks can come from just about anywhere in the States... the difference is the attitude they have... I still dislike the Yanks that come over here thinking they own the place, that we should be grateful that they come to Canada, and trash the place while they are here...

Americans on the other hand are pretty cool ;)...some of them actually want to know about Canada and would like to visit one day...

I just hope that ones who would like to come visit one day don't turn into Yanks when they get here...

Where this whole blog came from was the group of Americans I met tonight...seem like genuinely good people...however the ones that cut us off the whole way to the meeting...yeah they're yanks :P LOL