• Menu

The Day I Landed in Canada (And Why, and How!)

First Time In Canada
First Time In Canada

I first landed in Canada on a cold day in February. After a long trip through Latin America all the way down to Brazil, I was finally flying to a brand-new place for me to explore—North America.

It had never been my dream, though. North America was this big unfriendly landmass West of Europe, not a place I gave much thought in my hypothetical travel plans. But hey, the whole Latin American trip had been pretty crazy in a good kind of way. I couldn’t bring myself to go back straight to Europe, so I bought a plane ticket to Toronto with a stopover in Houston.

Goodbye, blue sky…

The flight to Houston was much shorter than I had expected. Two worlds, only a few hours away… We landed in Texas and waited at the airport for several hours before boarding our flight to Toronto.

At the airport and from above, North America was exactly what I expected—the roads looked like endless straight lines, cars were the sizes of the average European truck and cops seemed to have been fed raw meat for breakfast. The stereotype of Texas, basically.

Houston-Toronto was a short flight. I was waiting to discover how cold it would be in Canada in February.

Since I wasn’t initially supposed to go to Canada (or anywhere cold for that matter), I didn’t have a winter jacket. Oh well, Toronto couldn’t possibly be that cold, could it?

I pushed the airport door. I could feel the wind, bitter cold. I couldn’t move my toes and I hid my hands deep down in my pockets. It was cold. It went right through my skin. I felt numb.

But it felt wonderfully… Canadian. The air smelled a mix of snow, wood and wilderness. I just wanted to step into a house, sit by the fire, eat something hot and watch the snow falling from a cotton-white sky. I wanted to hibernate in peace. I wanted to tuck myself under the duvet and sip hot chocolate. I wanted to pause, after a long trip.

People are strange, when you’re a stranger

But Canada hadn’t been waiting for me. It had its own culture, its own language, slang, and jokes that I couldn’t understand. As a tourist, I was fine. I could deal with it—I was a traveller, after all, and I had been through Brazil without actually being able to fully understand a restaurant menu (which is, come to think of it, probably why I had loved “comida por kilo”). But part of me felt frustrated.

When I first went to China, I had expected to be a total stranger to the food, the people, the way of life and much more. I could speak the language, but I wasn’t even sure I could have said anything relevant. I had much to learn, much more than a few ideograms and I knew it. China had always been diametrically opposed to our Western conception of the world—I would actually have been disappointed to be able to apprehend the country. China is worth getting to know over time. It wouldn’t be given to anybody.

But Canada! I spoke the language, knew North America through movies and globalization culture, I was an experienced traveller goddammit! Why was I feeling so miserable? Shouldn’t be that tough to blend in, should it?

Every traveller makes a mistake once in a while. Mine was to think that because people looked like me, they could understand me. I was actually doubly wrong. Unlike in China, I wasn’t going to be “special,” and be looked after just because I was a Westerner. The world is a tough place, North America, is a tougher one. Survival of the fittest. Second of all, people weren’t going to understand me. I had to understand them.

It left me bitter for a while, but I adapted. And I discovered their good sides. Whereas in China I was doomed to be a lifetime foreigner, I was going to blend into this strange mosaic of people in Canada. I would keep some of my culture, but I’ll borrow and make another one my own. In China, I could fake it, but any trip to a small village would have made me a stranger. In Canada, I could be anything I wanted, as long as I knew the country and its culture well enough. More challenges ahead.

Share this article!
Zhu

French woman in English Canada.

Exploring the world with my camera since 1999, translating sentences for a living, writing stories that may or may not get attention.

Firm believer that nobody is normal... and it’s better this way.

View stories

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

2 comments