As I explained before, when I came to, I really didn’t expect it to be that dif­fer­ent from Europe. After all, I had sur­vived China, most Latin Amer­ica coun­tries, Aus­tralia, New Zealand… Why wouldn’t I blend in in Canada ?

I was wrong. Canada was dif­fer­ent : cul­ture, archi­tec­ture, peo­ple, soci­ety, pol­i­tics were kilo­me­ters… sorry, miles, from Europe. Yeah, it’s easy to come for a visit and live like a for­eigner, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to adapt. I wanted it to be my place. I wanted to mas­ter all.

Here are the five first things I noticed when I came to Canada

1) The weather :Canada is known to be a cold place. Really cold. So cold that Cana­di­ans like to brag about it. End­lessly. They also like to com­ment the weather. End­lessly. Not that I have any­thing against weather reports, mind you. It’s just that in France, they are usu­ally inac­cu­rate, and com­ment­ing the weather is okay only as long as you’re 80 years old and over. But here, not only weather reports are pretty much essen­tial if you don’t want to find your­self caught in a snow storm, but com­men­tat­ing them is a national sport. So be it. On the same sub­ject, Cana­dian weather’s vocab­u­lary is extremely rich. In France, you have rain/ cold/ foggy/ sunny. In Canada, you have cold/ very cold/ freezing/ rain/ freez­ing rain/ ice/ snow/ ver­ti­cal wet snow (I am not mak­ing that up !)/ hail/ snow storms/ flurries/ rain etc. Wow.

2) The dis­tances : Back in France, I had friends liv­ing on the other side of the city. A twenty min­utes walk. Top. In Canada, there’s the place I live in, my work place (25 min. drive), the shop­ping malls (East side or West side, take your pick but drive for 30 min.), the super­mar­kets (20 min. drive) etc. Never trust a Cana­dian when he/ she says : “it’s right next door !”. To go to that “right next door” place (let’s say it’s a spe­cific shop), you will have to :

• Take your car
• Drive for 30 min.
• Get into the park­ing lot and look for an empty space (5 min.)
• Walk from the park­ing lot to the entrance of the mall (another 7–10 min.)
• Once in the mall, find the shop you’re look­ing for (1^st, 2^nd or 3 rd floor ? East or West ?)

Hur­ray, you find it. Only took 45 min. It was right next door, wasn’t it ?

3) The… huge­ness : When I go visit in France now, I feel like I’m in Lil­liput. Yep, that bad. Why ? Because in Europe, the aver­age size is not 6 ft. I’m 5.6 ft. I’m fairly tall for a French women. Barely aver­age for Cana­di­ans. Every­thing is big. Streets take about 5 min. to cross and you actu­ally have to look both ways for cars. Cars are huge. Houses are… Well, let’s just say that if you’re used to the aver­age Paris stu­dio (bath­room + kitchen + living-room + bed all in the same room), you might be lost at first.

4) The food : Food is always plenty and avail­able every­where. You will soon get used to see malls’ food court busy any­time. Well, I can still under­stand that, flex­i­ble work hours etc. But food is… food is too much. I’ve almost never fin­ished a plate in a restau­rant. In France, “very lit­tle” is syn­onym of qual­ity : French peo­ple are always happy to pay 30 € for half a broc­coli, two car­rots and an inch squared piece of meet and then call them­selves “full”. In North Amer­ica, you pay $10 for the whole beef, three pounds worth of veg­gies and a huge dessert. Can’t fin­ish ? Take out your left-over. Can you imag­ine that in a French restau­rant ? “Garçon, Aïe can not fin­ish my broc­coli, pleeeze put it in a box for me, thank you beau­coup”.

5) The TV : Back in France, my daily chan­nel surf­ing might have looked like that :

• Turn­ing on the TV
• Check­ing out chan­nel #1, TF1
• Find­ing the movie bor­ing, check­ing out #2, France 2
• Find­ing that debates about Roman lit­er­a­ture was not that inter­est­ing
  
• Check­ing out chan­nel #3, with its 4 hours long Sen­ate minutes
• Check­ing out chan­nel #6, M6. Too bad, it went blank, one more time.
• Going to bed.

In Canada, it was more like…:

• Turn­ing on the TV
• Cook­ing diner wait­ing for the com­mer­cials to end
• Twist­ing my thumb cause it wasn’t trained to switch form chan­nel 415 to chan­nel 34 more the 30 times per hour
• Admir­ing the neces­sity of hav­ing a chan­nel ded­i­cated to weather, another to infomer­cial etc.
• See­ing peo­ple fight­ing, divorc­ing, hav­ing surgery, hav­ing acci­dents, hav­ing sex, hav­ing kids, dying, cry­ing, falling in love, turned on, turned off, get­ting a job and los­ing it the “you’re fired” style, expos­ing every sin­gle inche of their – often pathetic – lives to big brother.
• Get­ting addicted to the big eye on the world.

And that was only the beginning…

Related posts:

1. What We Sell To Coca-Cola Is Avail­able Humain Brain Time
2. 10 Clues I Became Canadian
3. Cold Crash Course
4. Seven (Cana­dian Win­ter) Facts
5. 5 Things Canada Taught Me