Trends

Debates, discussions, news articles, cultural differences stories and everyday life blah blah.

On The Road

Follow me in China, in Central and in South America, in Australia, in South-East Asia or in Europe. Enjoy the pictures and some crazy travel stories!

Immigration

How to immigrate to Canada, how to apply for Canadian citizenship, and how to tackle the challenges newcomers face.

Just Blogging

Blog contests, memes, interviews, photography hunts, random facts… Let’s connect, share some blogging fun and some little snippets of life.

The Saturday Series

The ten post Saturday series: how to immigrate to Canada, how to find a job, interviews with immigrants… and more!

Morning Glory

July 27, 2007 – 12:45 am | 19 Comments

Oh crap. It’s 8:50 and my brain is still sleep­ing. I ought to wake up.

I extri­cate myself from the car, a task harder than usual con­sid­er­ing I’m hold­ing a can of Diet Coke and my hand­bag, slung across my shoul­der, is burst­ing with col­ored fold­ers, papers, pho­to­copies and pens.

I step on the side­walk and slam the car’s pas­sen­ger door. I stand there and root around my hand­bag and pull out a lighter. Woohoo, first vic­tory of the day, not a small one con­sid­er­ing the mess in my bag.

La Desaparecida

July 16, 2007 – 12:29 am | 31 Comments
La Desaparecida

I left many places, many peo­ple, many times. I packed my bag fol­low­ing the same immutable rit­ual count­less times: my sleep­ing bag at the bot­tom with plas­tic san­dals, towel, sweaters and other light clothes piled …

The Wall

July 12, 2007 – 1:27 am | 22 Comments

I’m a white female, 5’7, 20–30 years old. Sounds fairly com­mon, doesn’t it ? I mean, really, I don’t have any­thing spe­cial. So why don’t I fit in these bloody boxes ?

The World For Dummies

July 8, 2007 – 5:40 am | 15 Comments
The World For Dummies

–I swear to god, you’re not speak­ing French. We’re all Amer­i­can here, we don’t under­stand your stu­pid lan­guage.
– Let’s speak Chi­nese !
– Not when we’re drunk ! Speak Eng­lish or get out !
Since I don’t …

Busy Week-End In The Blogosphere !

July 4, 2007 – 12:38 am | 21 Comments

Woo hoo ! What’s best to start the week after a long week­end ? A blog award ! Friendly Danielle from SEO is for girls pre­sented me with this schmooze award — appar­ently I’m good at inter­act­ing with other bloggers.

Sicko(s)

July 1, 2007 – 2:58 am | 34 Comments

I like Michael Moore. Sure, his movies are biased but since I’m left-wing, it doesn’t really hurt my feel­ings. On top of that, being an opti­mistic per­son, I do believe his inves­ti­ga­tions can make waves. But this time, I left the movie the­ater with mixed feel­ings. Since I’m famil­iar with both the Cana­dian and the French health care sys­tem, I knew Moore wasn’t telling us all the truth. And thus I started won­der­ing about the US health system .

The Interviews From Hell

June 9, 2007 – 1:59 am | 29 Comments

How many inter­views have I been to ? I’d say about thirty in Canada so far, ¾ of them in my first year in Ottawa. I was des­per­ate for a job but the odds seemed to be against me. At 20 years old, my resume was pretty short. I had no pre­vi­ous work expe­ri­ence in Canada. I had no ref­er­ences but abroad. My Eng­lish wasn’t that great and I wasn’t a Per­ma­nent Res­i­dent yet.

Dirty Little Secrets

June 2, 2007 – 8:06 pm | 26 Comments

How­ever, I soon dis­cov­ered that work­places bore some resem­blance with the world I was used to. Con­trary to my naive opin­ion, peo­ple don’t auto­mat­i­cally become smarter and well-behaved nor that they turn into hard-working knowl­edge­able pro­fes­sion­als once they get a job. Quite the oppo­site actu­ally. I also dis­cov­ered that every job had its dirty lit­tle secrets that only insid­ers know. And some­times, I was one of them.