Articles tagged with: Canada
Five Great Songs About Canada
Music is a powerful medium. Songs stir memories and can perfectly evoke places, express feelings—and yes, give a snapshot of a country.
Here are five songs that talk about Canada and evoke an aspect of the country, from funny city names to hockey, from the famous Canadian winters to Canadiana.
Pembroke, Ontario
To celebrate the last long week-end of the summer (Labour Day was today), we decided to take a short trip to rural Canada. We hit the road on Saturday morning and followed the bumpy Trans-Canada highway. Our first stop was in Pembroke, Ontario, 150 km from Ottawa.
The Customer Is King
In France, the saying goes that “le client est roi”. But in fact, the customer is anything but a king: at best he is an idiot, a minor annoyance in your day. As this funny article on “How to play the French service game … and win” explains: “The customer is king. But we all know what they did to their royal family. The guillotined head of Louis XVI bounced across the Place de la Concorde as a few thousand Parisians laughed at it”.
5 Canadian Debates
Generally speaking, Canada is a fairly quiet country: strikes and social unrest are rare, unlike in France where I grew up.
That said, each country has its debates and touchy issues that never seem to be solved and are always brought up in the media. Here are the most famous ones in Canada.
Damn, I Wish I Had Known That...!
I Have just received the precious letter from Citizenship and Immigration: on June 11th, I’m invited to write my citizenship test.
What I Miss From France... And What I Don't!
There are French things I miss, like the coffee culture and historic cities. But then, I think about the downsides: stupid shop hours, dodging dog poo, the bureaucracy…
Welcome Home...
The city hasn’t changed… I guess it never really does. It’s both comfortable and slightly disturbing to slip into our old lives, like nothing happened.
Only In France...
Like any other expat/ immigrants, Sasha occasionally misses home. Her “5 American things you can not recreate in Europe” made me laugh… and I figured I could easily list 5 French things I can not recreate in Canada.
A Nation Under Debt
I’m a small-time player. Or so said the last telemarketer who called to offer me a $10,000 Amex credit card. I gasped when I heard the figure. “But I don’t make that much money”, I naively admitted. “That’s why you should be interested in a higher limit credit card, ma’am. This is Canada”, he added, in his heavily Cantonese-accented English.
Stuffs Canadians Like (Part 2)
Ever heard of the Tragically Hip? Chances are if you did, you hold a Canadian passport. If no, don’t worry — you’re just a foreigner. The band from Kingston Ontario has been around for around twenty years but it just doesn’t work outside Canada. Could that be because their songs mostly revolve around hockey, small Canadian towns and Canadian history?
