Canada - when driving across land borders - choose busy ones.

Canada - when driving across land borders - choose busy ones. Living in a country which has less social drama, and where public discussion is conducted in a more sensible way is I think a very healthy thing for a stutterer. A couple years ago, I spent a month in Canada driving around, I was amazed at the warm heartedness of the people in that country... at how transparent they are. Some people seemed to be eager to reach out and make friendships with strangers, and these were very relaxed conversations that flowed very well. There seems to be an ethic in Canada that is different from the USA and some other Western countries, where people actually do try to reach out to casual strangers in their environment who seem to need advice or help. For example, I called a work agency asking about the possibilities of work permits and visas which would be possible to receive along those lines. And this woman, who sounded like she was Latino, was really eager to help. She said "A lot of us foreigners are here, and it's possible to make a go of it" I had someone come up to me in a big city coastal park with trails under the trees... and he wanted to chat about his thoughts about life, and I shared some of my own. There were many other positive experiences like that - after a church service I attended in a small town, and at a hostel I was at for a couple nights. People were really interested in hearing my points of view. Canada, to this day is my favorite English speaking country, and I would highly recommend that other stutterers check it out. I hope I can live there, someday. One thing to be aware of, however, is that stuttering really isn't a common thing in Canada - probably because people are much more transparent and relaxed in their personalities, and there's no social drama. Therefore, stuttering tends to go away. This is not only a positive, however. For those of us who still have the problem, there are implications. I was fine, stuttering my way through the Vancouver BC border crossing... the lady smiled nicely at me. But when I was crossing more than one time, in order to take advantage of the cheap American gas prices for some of my fill ups, my stuttering raised serious red flags for a very quiet Canada/US border crossing. People who haven't been around stutterers very much tend to think that it's all about nervousness regarding something you're doing wrong, or some form of deceit. Long story short, my car was searched, and because of one solitary image in the browser cache of my computer... along with some journal entries which were hastily written notes and were not clearly brushed up and edited (aren't we stutterers all people of the pen, at some times of our lives?), I was taken to jail for a week in Canada... I was banned from Canada for two years, and eventually my house in the US was searched and my computer and all the years of wild writings that I had on there were then in the hands of the police. The lesson in here, is that stuttering at land border crossings is probably just fine if it's a busy one (and at air terminals). However, when border agents at quiet outposts have all the time in the world on their hands, they might choose to search you thoroughly - and countries other than your own have different standards for what is illegal and why. One doesn't always research these things before going abroad. The image in the browser cache which was found was actually posted on a public subreddit and such an image is completely legal to look at in the USA. For my part, I never take any data on electronics (or on paper) with me through a border crossing anymore. It's always uploaded to the cloud and the device is wiped.