July the 1st has always been a special date for Brendan and I as it marks the beginning of the new financial year in Australia and given that we are both accountants that is like New Years Day for us. The 1st of July is a special day in Canada too, its their national day. Celebrating the Canadian national holiday was also part of our induction to the Calgary way of life. Calgary is quite similar to our home town of Perth, Australia and so we expected a similar type of celebration for Calgarians on Canada Day.
In essence the celebration is quite similar as people catch up with their friends and families and head to downtown and sit on the banks of the river and watch fireworks at night. The big difference is that a lot of shops were open on Canada Day, people don't run around wearing giant Canadian Flags as clothes and there was a food truck market in the evening with a live band so people could eat out.
We started our day by walking into downtown from our Airbnb (about a 50 minute walk) On our walk into downtown we stopped at Tim Hortons (Timmies for short) and had a Canada donut that they had bought out especially for Canada Day. The donuts were excellent and filled with jam. YUM!
Once we had finished our donuts we headed straight for Prince Edward Island where we found the food trucks, Shakespeare in the Park and plenty of people. After we had walked around for a while we went back to the food trucks and ordered the biggest poutines you have ever seen. We wanted to eat as Canadian as we could on their special day and besides poutine is pretty tasty. Thankfully we were able to find a nice park bench to eat our enormous poutines as we would surely have dropped them if we continued to walk and eat.
Tummys full to bursting we ventured into the heart of downtown and sat on the curb to watch and listen to some local country music. The vibe was awesome and everyone seamed to be enjoying themselves. It started to get a bit chilly while we were listening to the music and waiting for the fireworks to start (which was about 11pm as the sun doesn't set in summer until close to 10.45pm) and to combat this cold we decided to walk back to Prince Edward Island and explore a bit more hoping the walking would warm us up a bit.
Eventually we decided to go and sit back near downtown and get a good spot early for firework viewing. We sat and waiting and people watched as more and more people gravitated over to where we were sitting hoping to get themselves a good spot too. It was about 15 minutes before the fireworks were due and the sun had started to set when we make a last minute decision to go back through the Island and walk back up the steep climb on the other side of the river to view the fireworks. We decided to move there as this would shorten our walk home and we hoped it would also include less crowds.
This ended up being a perfect spot to watch the fireworks as we were elevated and therefore no-one was able to sit in our way and we had an uninterrupted view of the fireworks display. The fireworks were great and went for about 30 minutes. At the end of the fireworks the crowd of people all sitting on the side of the hill with us started singing the Canadian national anthem together. It game me goosebumps, it was so magical.
Lastly we started our walk home and after about 10 minutes most of the crowds had disappeared, though the cars had not. I'm not sure if this is a Canadian thing, Canada Day thing or it just happened but as we walked home and all the cars pulled out into grid lock they all started honking their horns. Not honking to get people out of their way but just honking in general merriment. They honked until we were half way home so after half an hour of the honking we were ready to kill some of the drivers. We have never experienced this in Canada before and we also didn't experience it during Stampede which came the weeks following Canada Day, so it truly remains a mystery.
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