Canada Day!

On July 1, 2011, Canada celebrated it's 144 birthday!  Like so many things in our two cultures, Canada Day is celebrated in a very similar way to Australia Day: a few drinks, a barbeque, fireworks and a day off work.  Sadly for us, we don't get an automatic day off, just for being Canadian.

We get asked quite often what the differences are between Australia and Canada.  After being here for 10 months, we are struck more by how similar our cultures are.  Maybe because of the influence of the BBC (parent of the CBC in Canada and the ABC here in Australia), the attitudes and concerns are pretty much the same.  People here complain about the government, the bad roads and heavy traffic, poor public transportation, the state of health care and the rest of the world.  They stand politely in lines and say "please" and "thank-you".  There are the same concerns for small towns and the rural way of life and the brain drain to other parts of the world.

There is nothing that is really Canadian that we miss, other than just having the comfort of familiarity.  The name brands of products are different, but the products themselves are pretty much the same.  (In our haste to get everything packed up in a very short period, we went out and bought bulk amounts of every toiletry we thought was vital, just in case we couldn't find what we wanted here...and now we have tubs full of deodorant, toothpaste and hair products that will expire long before we ever need them, and we never will need them because everything we need we can buy at the pharmacy!)

Some kind of bottle-brush looking Banksia-type bush

Oddly enough the thing that we miss is the change of seasons.  Here it is winter and while it is cooler, only a few trees have lost their leaves.  It really looks pretty much the same as it did in summer.  The grass is green, the flowers bloom and we have nice, sunny days.  Come spring in September, there won't be a change or a greening up of the landscape.  Still, if not having to deal with 3 metres of snow and -30C for six months, just to enhance the joy of seeing a tulip poke up through the slush shortly before being eaten by a squirrel is the price we have to pay for moving here, we'll take it!