blah…blah…blah… Ginger!

Have I mentioned, I’m sure I have, that we have Canadian TV? I’m not at all sure I’m similar to other Americans* but being from California my concept of Canada is minimal. I know Vancouver which is hip and cool and kind of like Seattle. Other than that, not much. I’ve never lived where it snowed, never even lived where a freeze was not an odd occurrence. So, you could also say that I know very little about the eastern and northern parts of the US. I’ve been there of course, but I flew in and I complained endlessly about the cold and then I flew out. I have never shoveled snow, never had to change my tires twice a year, never lost my entire garden under a blanket of cold stuff so that you can’t even tell where the pond is, never really believed that any plant could survive living half the year under ice and then come back in the summer. Basically, I’ve never lived where Mother Nature was trying to kill me for at least half the year.

Watching Canadian TV I’ve learned some interesting stuff. Like, it seems all Canadians have cottages and there are areas designated as ‘cottage country’. These are houses out in the boondocks usually on a very cold looking lake but they are only occupied for a couple months a year. Some people actually have all year cottages but they have to spend a whole lot of money to spend the weekend on a frozen lake and survive. Some of these cottages you can’t even get to in the winter. I watched an episode of Design Inc tonight where they were decorating one of these cottages and it was inaccesible after Thanksgiving. At first, I forgot that Canadian Thanksgiving is in October and thought that wasn’t too bad. It really put an extreme deadline on poor Sarah Richardson.

Did you know there is apparently a large market in Canada for illegal cigarettes? I’m not sure what makes them illegal but I’m pretty sure they aren’t pot, they look like Marlboro’s in the government warning ad. I suppose it is possible that Canadian pot comes with a filter, I’m beginning to realize that my impression that Canada was just a sort of northern extension of the US like Alaska is not true.

I’m admitting my ignorance here but I’m not sure I’m the only American with this misconception. Because most Canadians speak the same language, look similar to Americans, live next door, and don’t make much of a fuss about us – I think we tend to think they have the same culture. I’ve met more Canadians in Mexico than I had ever met in my life. They are from all sorts of areas that I had never heard of, they are just as opinionated as Americans, they are patriotic, they are proud of their country and their traditions and they have different traditions. Yea, I know, so hit me over the head with a brick.

Even knowing so many Canadians now I didn’t really get it that the culture is so different until I started watching their TV shows. Of course, you have to remember that most of my TV watching is on HGTV and that means I watch a lot of design and renovation and house hunting shows. I had no idea how difficult it is to keep all warm air inside and all cold air outside before this. The amount of caulking and sealing and insulating not to mention the mud rooms (I’d never, ever heard of a mud room) is daunting. I have to admit that the idea of living in a sealed up house kind of grosses me out, all that stale air… yuck. However, if the option was freezing to death or paying thousands of dollars for oil (who knew? they have tanks of oil in their houses that they burn for heat!) I guess I’d get over the aversion to stale air. Especially since I would be unlikely to ever leave the house once that killer snow arrived.

There is one ad that got me to write this post. I am kind of dumbfounded by the idea and can’t seem to stop pondering it. They have these drops, D Drops, that they put on their food to get enough vitamin D because they don’t see the sun enough and they’d get rickets or something. They put it on the baby’s bottles, the kids cereal, for all I know they put it in their gin and tonics. D Drops! I can’t really get my brain around that. No sun, no sun for a long, long time every year. Well, maybe a little sun but low and grey and not sending the vitamin D. That is the weirdest ad of all, I got over the ad where they say that 38% of Canadian women admit they wash their sheets less than once a month. Yea, it’s gross but I kind of figure they are lying to sell their detergent that is so much better at removing old body oils from sheets. But… NO SUN!

So, I started contemplating culture shock. I didn’t really get any of the normal symptoms when I moved to Mexico. Mexico seems familiar to me, I grew up not far away and it’s always been somewhere I’ve gone a lot. Yes, there were adjustments but none of the real, slap you in the face, how friggin odd is that, classic culture shock. On the other hand, I’m now fairly certain that I would be locked in the throes of full blown culture shock if I ever moved to Canada. Let’s be honest here, I’d have the same problem if I moved to New Hampshire. I don’t think I could easily adjust to a life built around surviving the elements. I spent a summer in Alaska once, I thought I was very brave. Actually, I hated it. It was the coldest summer of my life and I lived in San Francisco for years.

I’ve now decided that my easy adjustment to Mexico does not show my cosmopolitan sophistication but actually just shows that it wasn’t much of a challenge. I guess I’ll just go and put on another Jimmy Buffet song and pretend I’m hip.

*American. Yes, I know that there are 3 countries in North America and that people in both north and south America can call themselves Americans. Cool, go for it. The truth is though that the English word for people from the USA is American just as the English word for people from the Estados Unidos de México is Mexican. If you want to pronounce USAian then more power to you, I’m not interested.