First Time In Canada

I’d never dreamed much of it. North Amer­ica was this big unfriendly land­mass West of Europe, not a place to give much con­sid­er­a­tion when it came to trav­el­ing. 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 bough a plane ticket to Toronto with a stopover in Houston.

Good-bye, 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 had to wait there sev­eral hours before board­ing another flight to Toronto.

Fly­ing over Hous­ton, the USA were as I expected them to be: roads looked like end­less straight lines, cars were the sizes of the aver­age Euro­pean trucks and cops seemed to have been fed raw meat for break­fast. The aver­age Texas stereo­type per­fectly fit­ted the picture.

Back in the plane, Toronto. A short fly, await­ing to dis­cover the cold.

Since I wasn’t plan­ning to go to Canada (or any­where cold for that mat­ter), I hadn’t brought my win­ter jacket. Oh well, Toronto couldn’t pos­si­bly be that cold, could it?

Out­side. Once out through the doors, I could feel the wind, bit­ter cold. Couldn’t move my toes and to hide my hands deep down in my pock­ets. That’s cold. Goes through your skin, anaes­thetise it.

But it felt won­der­fully… Cana­dian. The air smelled a mix of snow, wood and wilder­ness. I just wanted to get inside any house, sit by the fire, eat some­thing hot and watch the snow, end­lessly falling from a cotton-white sky. I wanted to hiber­nate in peace. I wanted to tucked 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, jokes that I couldn’t under­stand. As a tourist, I was fine. I could deal with it: I was a trav­eler 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 pro 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 expe­ri­ence 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 being looked after just because I was a West­erner. World is a tough place, North Amer­ica, 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 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 in 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.

Related posts:

1. Dif­fer­ent, you said ?
2. Jig­saw Falling Into Place
3. I Won’t Boy­cott The Olympic Games
4. Cold Crash Course
5. Chameleon