a july-august straddler

Ottawa has a lot of Latinos!

These days, I've been spending many an hour on campus, along with a select group of others who have also chosen, for whatever stupid or legitimate reason, to take courses in the July-August session. I've recently come to the realization that Ottawa has a disproportionate number of Latinos, at least in comparison to Toronto.

Among the few homo sapiens I've been seeing prowling the desolate concrete forest that is Carleton in the late summer session are very young children.

Yes, that's right. And lot's of them.

I think it's got something to do with summer camp.

I have heard more Spanish being spoken among summer camp students than any other language, and heeding that, and the physical appearance of many of these children, I would conclude that many of them are Latino.

The only odd thing about all this is, throughout the course of my year living in this city I've seen very few Latino adults, but yet, all of a sudden, I'm seeing a very large number of Latino children.

Where the hell are their parents?

Feel free to provide me with a logical, plausible explanation to explain this phenomenon, that doesn't include conspiracies involving Hugo Chavez executing revered Venezuelan businessmen and exiling their children to equally immoral and decadent countries such as Canada and the United States to purify socialist Venezuela of such monstrous filth and their offspring.

Actually, maybe that isn't so implausible of an explanation after all......

I've also found that Ottawa is an appallingly small city (at least in comparison to Toronto). In fact, within one hour, I managed to walk from the heart of a major urban street to the outskirts of the city, where the sidewalk ended, and I started seeing signs providing distance figures for outlying small towns.

This was at 2 am, at which point I proceeded to a mall called "Southgate" (I only know this because of my Interac invoice) and purchased shrimp from the 24-hour Loeb. I then walked all the way back to my apartment, shrimp in hand, arrived at 3 am, defrosted the shrimp, started eating the shrimp, and watched a documentary about a dead, white governor-general.

Gotta love CPAC.