Canada Leaves Me Cold: a Lesson in Culture Shock
In stores where SOS-type scouring pads were labeled “tampons,” such confusion could produce catastrophic results.
Oh, Canada. I so expected to love you. But buried in snow and buffeted by chill, long after I am used to the first merry greeting of crocus, my heart has become as bitter as your cold and as hard as your ice. It wasn’t supposed to be like this with us. Where did we go wrong?
No one has entered into a mid-life change of this magnitude with as much gusto and positive attitude as I. A world traveler whose motto is Kahlil Gibran’s “The universe is my country and the human race is my tribe,” I couldn’t have been more excited to be branching out from my narrow American world to actually live in another country. The fact that they spoke French only thrilled me. After all, I’d learned enough Japanese, German, Spanish and Portuguese to bump along nicely in many world cities. What was one more language? Culture shock? Not bloody likely. This was only Canada, our 51st state, not Outer Mongolia or somewhere foreign.
Then I went grocery shopping. I’ve never enjoyed grocery shopping, so I have subdued this task with robot-like efficiency. In my city I knew where every item could be found and where it would be cheapest. Armed with my list, I could finish the whole lot in under a half hour. A half hour of shopping nearly finished me in my first sortie into a grocery store in Montreal. I quickly learned that efficiency plummeted at the hands of that French language thing. If they used the same products, package designs, and logos that I was used to, such as Tony the Tiger, (even if he was wearing a beret and waving the fleur-de-lis) I could have shopped by product recognition. But everything seemed unfamiliar and I was confounded at every turn. In stores where SOS-type scouring pads were labeled “tampons,” such confusion could produce catastrophic results. This was further proven by my short-lived joy in finding ground beef for only $1.32USD/lb. Of course the package didn’t say “Ground Beef $1.32USD/lb.” I had to figure that out all by myself. It said, “Viande Chevalaine Hachée Maigre $4.39/Kg.” So, I first had to figure out in what mysterious way a Kg related to an lb. Then I had to do some division stuff. This led me to the startling discovery that this meat was only $1.99/lb in Canadian dollars. I discovered the magnitude of the bargain when I converted the price to US dollars, a habit that no longer makes sense since I was paying in Canadian dollars, but persists because it’s like a percentage-off sale. All of this was frustrating and time consuming, but worth it. Until I saw other packages labeled “bouef,” which looked suspiciously like a word that would involve the cow animal. If this other stuff was bouef, I asked myself, what was chevaline? It, I discovered, involved the horse animal. Still reeling from this near miss, I scanned the meat bins looking for something edible when I saw what can only be described as a carcass. A skinned carcass with dead black eye balls. I know now that it was something that involved the sheep animal, but it looked like a large, bald cat.
Things were going downhill fast.
If grocery shopping in Montreal was a shock, driving in Montreal has become the nightmare of my nightmares. The freeways are a testament to what can be accomplished by engineers drunk on cheap Burgundy. The exits appear out of nowhere, with no advance warning. There are potholes the size of tourist attractions. The Emergency Notification signs are in French, which is not a good thing if what they are blinking is “Bridge out ahead.” The drivers’ code is survival of the most idiotic. God help the poor befuddled person (me) who doesn’t know where she is going. They drive me off the road while screaming something in French that I’m sure isn’t “Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?” The chaos doesn’t end at the exits. Driving down residential streets, I experience a wide variety of near misses and possibilities for mass lamings and carnage. It’s like a playing a computer game I like to call “Dodge ‘Em.” The object of the game is to arrive at the end of the street without killing any of the human obstacles that are thrown helter skelter into my path. There are strollers being pushed baby-first into the fray, roller blades, delivery bicycles, skateboards, circus clowns on unicycles, and every other kind of wheeled conveyance with the exception of rickshaws. Car doors are flung open into my path. Little old ladies with their pushcarts of groceries totter down the sidewalk then suddenly dart in front of the car. Children set up hockey nets in the intersections and have a quick game during green lights. There is one “safe zone” and that is the crosswalk. It is the only place on the street where I can be certain not to run into any pedestrians. If I win the “game” and make it safely home, I’m faced with an even bigger challenge. Let’s call it the Bonus Round.
In the bonus round, I have to find a parking place within 20 kilometers (whatever those are) from my flat. Mind you, there might be one right in front of my door, but I must obey the sign that clearly states there is to be no parking:
12h00 à 14h00
Mar.
8h00 à 13h00
1er avr. Au 31 oct.
Mar.-Mer.-Ven.
1er nov. au 31 mars
Roughly translated, it means that there is no parking in Montreal any day with an à in it, snow days or days the sun comes up or goes down. After carefully reading and heeding such signs, I’ve only gotten 413 tickets.
I think I could happily adjust to most of these grotesqueries, passing them off with a breezy, “Oh, those wacky Quebecois!” if it were not for an issue far more insidious, something that makes my blood run cold, even on the three warm days. Simply put, Quebec is a police state. Sure, I knew that they spoke French in Quebec, but I thought they did it to be cool. I had no idea that French was the state religion and that heretics would be pursued and martyred. I did not know of the Office de la langue francaise (OLF, not to be confused with ELF, who is an much jollier entity) or as is said in the forbidden shibboleth, “The Language Police.” In the US, a mental hospital in Oregon was advertising for someone who speaks Klingon as one of 55 languages needed by clients. Not usually a patriotic person, I feel I must gladly stand up next to you and sing that I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free to speak Klingon if that’s what the voices in my head want to speak. I’m free from nonsense like the antics of OLF that I read about in the paper every day. I used to read the paper at night, but the outrageousness of the language situation would rile me up past the point of insomnia. Now, I start my day riled. And a little scared. It scares me when I see a wine bottle’s label covered over with a plain white sticker to hide the nasty English words that proclaims it to be California Zinfandel. It scares me when OLF scours the web, looking for small Montreal businesses that dare to put up websites advertising their products in the devil’s language. It scares me to read of people being threatened with fines for handing out business cards in English or trucks being auctioned off because of a single apostrophe or a Jewish gravestone-maker being warned to remove five Hebrew characters because they are bigger than the French words on his sign. Only in Quebec does “Kentucky Fried Chicken” become “Poulet Frit Kentucky.” Only in Quebec could the headlines announce that “Premier Landry Declares City of Montreal ‘Too English.’” Well excuse me to pieces, Your Supreme Frogginess, but that was moi screaming my lungs out in what happens to be the other Official Language of Canada, the country I thought I moved to.
Is that where we went wrong, Oh Canada? I thought I moved to one place but ended up in another? In the Quebec movie Mambo Italiano, the Italian father explains that no one told him there were two Americas: the real one, the United States, and the fake one, Canada. He goes on to explain that no one told him there were two Canadas, the real one, the rest of Canada, and the fake one, Quebec. Well, no one explained it to me either. So here I am mourning my warm feelings for the Canada I was so sure I’d love while merely surviving a purgatory that leaves me in the cold.
Copyright ©2003 Cynthia Wilson
Addendum: Once I conquered my culture shock, I grew to love Canada and Montreal and spent a few wonderful years there, although the police state about the French language and how divided the people were because of it, was always upsetting to me.
I'm an Anglo Montrealer, born and raised. I haven't lived in the city for years, though. Thank you for this perspective!