Things I really appreciate about Canada

Note, this is different from things I miss about Canada. For example, I miss shower curtains. But I really appreciate the fact that Canada has public education. Let's begin, shall we?

• Ambulances - the ambulances here are literally twenty year old vans that have been painted and refitted to serve as ambulances. I would not like to be rescued in one of them.

• Dental hygiene - there is a ridiculous number of people here that are either missing teeth or have false teeth (i.e. implants). How can you tell? All the false teeth have a little gold border around them, which sometimes starts to separate from the rest of the fake tooth and it makes it look like you have straw stuck in your teeth. Permanently. There's a little girl at my work, she's probably six or seven, and all of her front (baby) teeth were all rotted and she was crying because they hurt her so much. I don't want to know what her teeth'll be like when she's an adult. P.S. Mom, can you make me a dentist appointment for when I get home?

• Museums - I went to a natural history museum a few days ago, and to be honest, I was actually shocked by how incomplete their collections were. They had a leg bone from a mammoth, a skull from a prehistoric alligator, and a shell from something like an ankylosaurus that I'd never seen before. They had parts of some 12,000 year old man, but it was more like half a skull, a few ribs, and a bunch of walnut-sized rocks that were apparently bones. In museums in Canada, things like that would never happen - a museum wouldn't even consider showing an incomplete skeleten before at least making plaster replications of the bones they were missing.

• Traffic laws - in Bolivia, there aren't any speed limits, you don't need a license to drive, traffic lights are optional, most cars don't have seatbelts and many have headlights that don't work, and no one's going to stop you if you drink and drive. I saw a really terrible car crash up front and personal about a week ago, where I think a car was going the wrong way down a one way residential street. Both cars were going at least 50 km/h, and I'm honestly surprised no one died (as far as I know).

• Refridgeration - in my house at least, it's quite common for food to be left out of the fridge for hours. If someone isn't hungry, their food sits out until they feel like eating. If meat's for dinner, it's probably going to sit on the counter in the hours between when dinner gets planned and when dinner gets cooked. No, I don't think I've gotten stomach worms yet, but we'll see when I get home.

• Clean running water - of course Canada is the land of freshwater, but it's nice to remember that every once in a while - in Canada we don't need to boil water before drinking it, we can brush our teeth with tapwater, the toilet doesn't randomly decide not to flush, nor does the shower randomly decide to turn off while you are in the middle of shampooing. And having prevalent, cheap, drinking water, means people actually drink water with meals instead of soda (which is cheaper here)... see point number two about bad teeth.

So basically, all the things that I'm coming to appreciate fall into the category of health and safety. Jeez, I feel like a mom, I should start driving a minivan.