Canadian "Not Far Away"

Some people say that Canada and Austria are pretty much the same. They are not. There are quite a lot similarities, but there are also many, many differences. The most significant one is probably the distance.
Canadian distances are not what we are used to in Europe. Seeing as Canada is the second-biggest country of the world, travvelling become a whole new experinece. While I can be from my hometown in Italy in only 2 hours, here you can drive for 10 hours and still be in the same state.
Before i came here, I used to tell everyone that Kamloops is a city near Vancouver. Well, it is close in a Canadian perspective, but for the European mind 4 hours don't seem that close.
After 4 weeks (yes, it's 4 weeks already!) of being here, you somehow get used to it. The last days I was planning a trip to Jasper and Banff, two national parks in Alberta. The parks are pretty big and right next to each other. Well, I didn't think of the fact that even tough on the map the two parks are very close, it's still 6 hours to get from the town of Jasper to the town of Banff. Because we also have to get there which is another 4-5 hours and we also want to do something when we're there, this is a bit too much for a weekend trip so we limited our trip to go to Banff only.
Besides, trips of four or five hours are totally normal, in shorter time you won't get anywhere.

Apart from the longer distances you have to overcome when visiting other places, also the distances in the city seem longer. Kamloops is a quite small town with only 85 000 inhabitants but it's widely spread out. Sometimes it seems like I'm just walking all the time I'm here. The campus is literally right next to my residence but still I walk 10-15 minutes to get to the buldings I need because it is so big. Also the shops and everything around here seem to be close but you walk and walk quite a lot. In addition, the busses here are not really reliable which is why we often walk down to the city center (and then uphill again!) So, I hope I will get super-fit in the time I'm here, all this walking has to have some purpose.