Let's learn English downtown!

Hi Bob the Canadian here.

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Hey, Bob the Canadian here.

I thought that we would take some time today to learn some English downtown.

Downtown is how we describe the parts of a town or city where it originally started.

So this is the downtown area of my local town.

And it has a lot of things for us to look at and along the way, I'll teach you a little bit of English.

So this is downtown Dunnville!

So in a downtown area, you'll find sidewalks, you'll see a sidewalk over here.

Where the sidewalk meets the road is what we call the curb.

So this right here is the curb.

It's a little hard to see because of all the snow.

And then usually on each side of the street, you'll see what we call parking spaces or a parking spot.

In some towns there will be a small meter, a parking meter where you can put money in in order to pay for the parking spot,

but in this town, yeah, you can see the lines right here, you're allowed to park on each side of the street for free.

So that's kind of cool!

The parking areas that you find in a downtown area sometimes have a sign that tells you what the parking rules are.

So this parking spot says you can park from 8 AM to 2 AM but only for 2 hours.

And above that it says it's a snow route from November 15th to April 15th and you're not allowed to park there from 2 AM to 8 AM.

That's to let the snow plows come through and clear out the snow.

Another thing you'll see in a downtown area are storefronts.

So you can see along the other side of the road there that there's a number of stores.

And if I turn around, you can see behind me there's also a row of storefronts.

So storefronts usually have of course the entrance, let me see if I can find an entrance here, this green door is an entrance, but they also have their front display window.

You'll find all sorts of different stores in a downtown area.

In this downtown, there's a music store, there's a sweets shop where you can buy candies, there's a couple of restaurants.

Across the street there's a jewelry store, there's a bank, and there's also an electronics store.

So generally in a downtown area, you can find almost any kind of store you want.

When I look across the street I see a shoe store, I see a drug store, and two more banks.

I guess banks are important because you can get money to go buy something.

Another nice thing about downtown is you usually have streetlights.

You can see along this street here, there are a few streetlights and there's one above me as well.

I'll give you a closer look at it.

You can see that these street lights are still decorated for Christmas.

But the nice thing about a downtown is it has streetlights, it has the storefronts, and at night, you can come down and do a little bit of shopping because there's lots of light.

If you listen, you can hear a bird singing.

I hope that means Spring is coming!

Another thing you'll have downtown are places to park your bikes or a bike rack.

So you can see here, even though it's winter in Canada, someone still rode their bike to the downtown area today and they have a bike lock on it, you can see the bike lock here, attaching it to the bike rack.

So a lot of times in a downtown, you'll find a bike rack where you can park your bike and lock it up.

Another thing you'll see in a downtown area are a lot of fire hydrants.

So fire hydrants are a place where firefighters can come with their fire truck if there's a fire, and it's a source of water where they can hook up their hoses in order to fight the fire.

So you'll see a lot of fire hydrants in a downtown area as well.

So because a downtown area is a place where the town wants people to come and enjoy themselves you usually have some park benches.

So even though we're not in a park, you can see that there are some park benches here.

As well there will often be lots of garbage cans.

It's nice to keep the downtown clean, so you'll almost always see garbage cans and benches along the way just to create a nicer area for people to spend time in.

So you'll often find a mailbox in a downtown area, where you can still mail letters.

The letters go in the top here.

You can open it up, put your letters in.

By the way, if you haven't sent me a postcard yet you still can.

My address is down in the description.

In Canada, where it freezes in the winter, you'll see a lot of this.

This is a bucket of salt or a container of salt.

And we have that there because we put salt down when it's really cold and frozen and there's ice on the sidewalks and the salt will actually melt the ice.

So quite often in the downtown area, you'll have businesses, but above the businesses, you'll have small apartments.

So you have stores or businesses on the bottom level, but in these buildings, the next two levels are actually small apartments where people live.

So you could rent an apartment and live in the downtown area above a small business.

There's a pigeon that lives in this town.

I'm not, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure what he's doing but he was up on this roof and he just flew down here so.

In a lot of bigger cities, you'll see a lot of pigeons.

I think 'cause people feed them.

That would be my guess.

So the place between two buildings is called an alley, or an alleyway, or a back alley.

So you can see there's a building on this side and there's a building on this side, and this area here between the buildings is called an alley, or alleyway, or back alley.

Here's what this town looked like a long time ago.

It's kind of cool because you can see the old cars, but a lot of the buildings are still the same as the buildings that we were just looking at.

So it's pretty cool.

A nice old picture of the downtown.

Well, hey, that was a look at the downtown area of one of my local towns.

I hope this video helped you learn some English.

I'm Bob the Canadian here.

Learn English with Bob the Canadian.

Thank you so much for watching.

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