Wel­come to Cor­rer Es Mi Des­tino! I hope you will enjoy com­ment­ing on the arti­cles, read­ing, and brows­ing. Grab a cup of tea or a cof­fee and let me intro­duce myself. I promise I’ll keep it short and sweet.

I’m Juli­ette, aka Zhu—that’s my Chi­nese name. Yes, I am aware of the fact that I am not even remotely Chi­nese. I do speak Man­darin though, but it’s a long story.

I was born and raised in Nantes, France. I’ve been liv­ing full-time in Canada’s national cap­i­tal, Ottawa, since 2004. After becom­ing a per­ma­nent res­i­dent in 2005 (it took only five months for my appli­ca­tion to be processed!), I became a Cana­dian cit­i­zen on July 3, 2009. I now have two cit­i­zen­ships: French and Cana­dian. You can read my full immi­gra­tion story here.

Immi­grat­ing to Canada and becom­ing Cana­dian, one snow­ball fight at the time, has been a great adven­ture. I did expe­ri­ence some cul­ture shock, which pro­vided blog mate­r­ial at first and some good laughs. Note that I still don’t get how Cana­di­ans can walk around wear­ing shorts and t-shirts when it’s barely above 0ºC.

From 2005 to 2009, I worked as a French as sec­ond lan­guage teacher—I always found it ironic I ended up teach­ing French after learn­ing Chi­nese for 12 years. In 2009, I started work­ing as an Eng­lish to French trans­la­tor and a bilin­gual editor/proofreader. I’m a self-defined word nerd and I love my job but on Mon­day morn­ings (same for you, right?).

On my spare time, I’m also a trav­eler and a pho­tog­ra­pher, with an inter­est in street and travel photography.

I chose to set­tle in Canada because I love this mul­ti­cul­tural coun­try and because I wanted to belong somewhere—I’ve never felt French enough in France. Yet, I still have the urge to go trav­el­ing and I’m addicted to explor­ing the world. Was I made to set­tle some­where? Part of me enjoys life at home but the other side of my brain just want to pack and go to travel to other con­ti­nents, to cross the oceans, sleep in long dis­tance buses and walk in a new city every day.

Yeah, I’m not the eas­i­est per­son to live with. I know.

Cor­rer es mi des­tino… isn’t it?

Zhu (珠）