In The Dead of the Winter

Com­ing back from the trop­ics reminded me how harsh win­ter in Canada can be, and how hard it can be to adapt to this unique chal­lenge. Yet, because I’ve been liv­ing there for a few years, I’m pre­pared and within a few min­utes of land­ing in Ottawa, I was wear­ing my full win­ter armour, com­plete with gloves and a hat.

American and Canadian English 101

Lan­guage is highly cul­tural. Gram­mar and spelling can be taught at school but some vocab­u­lary can only be learned in the street or even—gasp!—watching T.V.
In my first few years in Canada, immersed in the cul­ture, I learned a lot of words and expres­sions I wouldn’t have found in gram­mar books.

My November

Novem­ber is such a depress­ing month—I don’t even know why it exists. Days are cold and damp and it is pitch black by the time I go back home at 5 pm. This month is an inter­reg­num between pump­kins and Santa Claus, between red leaves and snow. I guess we need a tran­si­tion period to adapt but boy, Novem­ber drags on forever.

The Picky Eaters

Some cou­ple argue about money, reli­gion or work. We argue about food.

Food is deeply cul­tural and in our Chinese-French-Canadian house­hold, we blend flavours. Some would call it “world cui­sine”. I call it “a-compromise-so-that-we-don’t-kill-each-other”.

The Rideau Bus Stop

I have a love and hate rela­tion­ship with Ottawa’s tran­sit sys­tem. I take the bus but the bus hates me.
Tak­ing pub­lic trans­porta­tion is a sec­ond nature to me. I grew up in a city and I took the bus and the tramway a lot. In France, we only drove if we had to get out of the city. Gas is expen­sive and cities are made for pedes­tri­ans, not cars: nar­row one-way streets, weird signs and traf­fic laws and traf­fic jams are a strong deter­rent for drivers.

Pumpkins and Snow

I don’t get Hal­loween. Even though some of the ear­li­est Hal­loween tra­di­tions started in Europe, we didn’t cel­e­brate it at all when I was a kid in France. It was pri­mar­ily a North Amer­i­can tra­di­tion we knew about because of the U.S. hor­ror movies. But about 15 years ago, Hal­loween saw a resur­gence in pop­u­lar­ity in France with the help of a huge mar­ket­ing cam­paign led by major Amer­i­can com­pa­nies such as McDon­alds’, Eurodis­ney and Coke.

5 Things Canada Taught Me

Years after years, I take the pulse of the pop­u­la­tion and I can’t help com­par­ing France to Canada. While the for­mer is still a great coun­try on many aspects, there are many rea­sons why I won’t come back to live in France any­time soon. On the other side, I recently real­ized that Canada taught me a lot more than I expected.

The Nostalgic Chameleon

It’s not that I didn’t try to keep in touch with French cul­ture. At first, my mind stretched itself to join the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean – it was exhaust­ing. I lis­tened to French talk shows but I grew frus­trated because they seemed to have lit­tle rel­e­vance to my cur­rent life. I tried to trans­late jokes but failed mis­er­ably. I threw the odd cul­tural ref­er­ence in that no one here got.