It seems to have been quite lucky that I chose to get off in Edmonton for a few days, as the train I've joined for the last leg of my journey across Canada has been full of a younger crowd than the earlier one and the observation car is suddenly full of people wanting to chat and discuss their travels and play card and board games rather than spending all their time glued to their mobile phone making sure that Valerie at the office has sent the paperwork to Dave at the Seattle branch. I had to bash my head against the table a couple of times on the way from Vancouver to Edmonton, wondering why people who were heading across the country on business would choose to hog the observation car when they had absolutely no intention of actually enjoying the view. There are a number of interesting people making their way across the country with me this time around, all of them very friendly and eager to share their combined wisdom with me about all the places I really should've seen. If I hear one more person say anything along the lines of "What, you didn't see X and Y while you were in Seattle? I can't believe it", I shall just scream.

Back in the observation car, I am now pretty much stapled to my seat. Things like going to the toilet and consuming food (not together, I hasten to add) are things of the past now - the view from the observation car of white snow covered fields and the occasional log cabin is no less interesting than the Rockies were a few days ago and there's no way I'm going to risk losing my seat. Mind you, I think I've made enough new friends in the bubble to be quite sure that they would guard my seat for me while I was away, growling at anybody who looked like they might want to park their backside on it for a moment. The mysterious footprints of unknown creatures - probably more likely to be moose, bear and wolves despite the insistence of the slightly weird looking bloke at the next table that they offer definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot, criss-cross the snow for as far as the eye can see all around. Most of us are glued to the windows, hoping for a quick glimpse of something moving between the trees, but so far the only sign of life we've seen has been somebody on a farm trying to reverse their truck out of a snowdrift

Having had an opportunity twice now to plonk myself down in one place for a few days and experience life in a Canadian City, not to mention a few major stops earlier in the trip in the USA, I have a few observations to make on North America in general, and in particular the way a lot of people think over here. When you buy something in North America, you have to remember that the tax is never included in the price printed on the product. If you buy a packet of Tic-Tacs labelled on the shelf at 60 cents, for example, the girl at the checkout will smile at you, exchange polite conversation about how much she likes your accent, and then charge you 65 cents. I usually protest, quite sensibly I think, that since everybody has to pay the same tax and nobody is exempt, it would make far more sense to do what they manage to do in the rest of the world and actually label items at the correct price. If they did this, I explain, my voice slowly rising to a crescendo, people might not have to stand in line behind me sniggering at the ignorant foreigner who has carefully put together the correct change only to discover that I need to fumble in my pockets for more when I get to the checkout. I mean, where is the logic in not telling anyone the whole amount they have to pay? Labelling something at one price and charging another is generally called "fraud" everywhere else on the planet...

I suspect, actually, that this odd state if affairs may have something to do with the equally nonsensical tax system over here, where everybody is expected to keep all their receipts for the whole year and file a tax return at the end of it listing everything they've spent or earned, even if they are an individual. The tax system in North America is probably among the most complex in the world, with taxes having to be paid to the government of the country, the local state, and various other official bodies separately - so knowing exactly how much you've paid for everything before tax would allow you to add it all up and claim a refund if you've paid too much at the end of the year - but that's what a receipt is for. Label the product at the full price so people don't have to do mental arithmatic in their head every time they want to buy a candy bar, and then put the amount of tax charged on the printed receipt. You know, like everywhere else. It's not rocket science.

I'm not kidding - you are actually expected to know everything you've spent every time you go to the shops over here, and report it to the government on a tax return - how needlessly stupid is that? In the UK, your employer is responsible for telling the state how much you've earned and your tax is taken straight out of your wages every month without you having to do anything. Nobody cares about what you've spent in the shops because sales tax is included anyway and nobody can avoid it. The only reason anyone needs to file a tax return in the UK is if they are self employed and have no employer to do it for them, so most people will never even see a tax return in their life.

Of course, all of this would be far too analytical for a young cashier working behind the counter in a supermarket who would rather be out somewhere with his mates. I asked one of the clerks at the local shop today why they don't include tax in the price displayed, and his reply was about as honest as I could have wanted: "This is Canada," he told me, "and you're expecting things to make sense?"

In Britain, the BBC is called the BBC wherever you are - go to Wales, Scotland, Ireland or England, and you can still tune into the BBC and watch your favourite shows. This system, however, would be far too simple for North America, so all of the major networks over here routinely change their names for no apparent reason between cities - sometimes, and I do realise that this is totally in my mind, it seems as though many of them are called something completely different between hotels within the same city! It's no good trying to find NBC in Seattle, because it doesn't exist - it's called KING. Looking for ABC? Try tuning to KOMO instead.

TV isn't the only public service that's different - at home the Royal Mail delivers the post, but over here it's the Postal Service that delivers the mail. Or at least, they deliver it to a box at the end of the driveway. When you first hear that people over here don't routinely have a small hole in their front door for the postman to insert letters through, and actually have to put on a coat and trudge through the snow to the end of the driveway to collect their post, there is a tendency to put on your "stupid Americans" hat and rant on about how this is unsurprising in a country where the paperboy couldn't even be bothered to get off his bike and instead simply tosses your daily paper across your lawn in the hope that it lands somewhere near the front door without breaking any windows. However, in small communities away from a local post office, there is actually a plus side to this end-of-the-drive mailbox business. You see, outside of the big towns it isn't at all unusual for the postman - sorry, mailman - to collect any outgoing mail at the same time that he delivers the incoming mail. You simply put the letters you want to send in your box at the bottom of the drive, and when the mailman stops by he takes out the letters you want to send and takes them back to the sorting office with him, replacing them with anything addressed to you. What a great and genuinely friendly thing to do! So why is there a little flag on American mailboxes? Well, would you want to put your coat on and walk all the way down the drive in the morning only to ind that there was nothing there to collect? Of course you wouldn't - so when you collect your mail in the morning, you put the flag down, and when the mailman puts letters inside he puts the flag up to let you know that he has done so. You just look out of your window in the morning, and if the flag is still down then you know there's nothing waiting for you at the other end of the drive, and you stay in the warm and make yourself a cup of coffee.

At McDonalds, a hamburger is apparently not considered plain in this country unless it has cheese on it. I queried this with the girl behind the counter this morning, as I am not a rabbit or a mouse and do not wish to partake of leaves or cheese with my beef burger, and she turned to her colleague in exasperation to explain in plain earshot: "The customer wants his plain hamburger without cheese!!!" She then advised me that, in future, I should specify that I don't want the cheese when I order a plain burger, because in this part of the world the word plain obviously doesn't mean "without anything extra" as it does everywhere else, instead meaning "without anything extra, except the cheese. Leave that bit on". But then, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this basic lack of understanding of the language - after all, fast food chains are also very keen on advertising "medium fries" and a "medium soft drink", even though there is no such thing as either of these in a small variety. The word "medium" means between other sizes - I would've thought, in my humble opinion, that it would be impossible to have a medium soft drink without also having both small and large versions available. I'm no lawyer, but I'm surprised, in a country where everybody likes to sue everybody else for everything, that nobody has tried to take any of these companies to court for misrepresentation. Just my opinion.

The Americans and Canadians, I've noticed from watching television and having conversations with people over the last few weeks, seem to have a strange lack of knowledge when it comes to their own history. I suppose that this is in part due to the fact that the education system here puts so much stock into making sure that kids graduate with a working knowledge of important subjects - like calculus. Do you know, in all the time I've been on this continent, not once has anybody in a shop tried to charge me an amount of money so close to zero that it couldn't be written using the standard number system. I mean, calculus for Gods sake. Honestly, can you think of any applied use for such information in the real world, other than in a very specialised job for which you would need to be trained anyway? No, of course you can't. A more pointless subject to force down kids throats, I cannot imagine. But I digress... let's get back to my rant on lack of basic historical knowledge.

On the Jay Leno show the other day, Jay went out onto the streets of Los Angeles to ask passers by blindingly obvious questions about events of the twentieth century. One student, who proudly explained that he was studying to become a teacher, was absolutely convinced that the first astronauts landed on the moon some time in the 1920s, and that the Berlin Wall once divided China. Nearly everyone asked agreed that Pearl Harbour was either in China or Japan, but they couldn't decide which. And while on the subject of mass slaughter, one young woman told Jay that she wasn't really sure what had happened at Hiroshima but thought the US had dropped some "bad gas" on it.

One lad, who is probably now in fear of his life from every female on the planet, confidently answered the question "When did women get the vote in this country?" by saying "Oh, that's easy. 1990." Another thought that Neil Armstrong reached the moon "sometime during the eighteenth century". But my all time favourite was the woman who was asked the simple question "Which city did the Berlin wall separate?" - almost immediately, she replied: "City? Surely it was Germany?"

"Yes," pressed Jay, "but which city in Germany was the Berlin wall actually in?" The woman thought for a long time about this, before finally replying: "Moscow?"

I could go on with these gems all day. In fact, I think I will. Several people thought there had already been a third world war, no doubt getting confused with a small fracas in Korea. The president who could not tell a lie, you will be surprised to learn, was not George Washington after all but Bill Clinton (Isn't that a classic?) - however, Washington hasn't been completely forgotten by the public because several of them were convinced that he dropped the bomb on Hiroshima two hundred years after his death! In answer to the question "Who were we at battle with during the Civil war?", a young student studying at UCLA said that she thought it was the British, even when re-prompted with the accent on the word civil. Unfortunately, this apparent basic lack of knowledge really isn't helped by the way television viewers over here are constantly treated as dummies by the advertising companies. A current advert for a sports car depicts a driver speeding along a city street, weaving in and out of the other vehicles to show off the handling - and the entire advert is overlaid with the no-brainer caption "This is a stunt driver on a closed road. Do not attempt these manoeuvres in your own vehicle.

I am amused to find, in conclusion, that in this vast country where things such as basic grammar take a back seat to shopping, downtown Edmonton is home to something called a Centre for Sport and Wellness. Wellness? Since when is wellness a word? I think you'll find, guys, that the word you're looking for here is "health" - the Centre for Sport and Health, now doesn't that just trip more easily off the tongue? Having said that, I should point out that my word processor, which I haven't got around to telling that I'm not American yet, has no problem with the word at all - it is quite happy to underline words such as "colour" in blue so that I can see how stupid I've been to spell them correctly, but when it comes to made up nonsense words such as "wellness" for which a perfectly acceptable and grammatically correct word already exists, it doesn't so much as think about complaining. Good old Bill Gates again, taking over the universe.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.