As my Canadian experience grows with each passing day, I am becoming more and more aware of how expensive things here really are – in Ontario at least, where I live.
I was waiting for a bus and saw this across the street:
Two Indian-looking guys (both 30ish, real South Asian “Indian“, not “native” Indians) were standing outside an apartment building, with their backs to the Lobby. A white (40ish, ‘visible majority’) guy accompanied by a woman, came out of the lobby, sneaked up behind them, and yelled at the top of his lungs, over their heads: “Shoo!”. This startled the hell out of the two guys.
It has finally happened. And it was bound to happen. The relevance of it that this happened during my first 3 months here in Canada has special significance for me. Have I moved to a hotter Canada already?
As a result of Israel‘s bombing of Lebanon, some 20,000 Canadian citizens are being evacuated from Beirut. The Star, the leading newspaper here, asked its readers “whether Ottawa is doing enough to evacuate Canadian citizens from Lebanon”.
I am neither a Canadian citizen (yet) nor from Lebanon, but I found the following answers particularly distressing interesting. Note that these are two replies out of 9, and that could make, unscientifically sampled, 22.2% percent of Canadians who feel that:
World Cup is over at last. And as I write this entry, I can hear car horns blaring outside and people – read Italians – shouting and chanting. It’s bound to be a party night for them for sure.
I watched the World Cup Soccer Final on a local TV channel here, complete with an American commentary. I would like to re-emphasize that I watched the Final (and previous games) with an American-accented commentary.
I wonder what makes one of Canada’s largest widely-read-mainstream-media-giant-newspaper-blah-etc like The Globe and Mail to invite instant reader comments as if it were a cheap-opinion discussion forum or a personal opinion blog (like this one, I admit!) and not an informed-opinion national newspaper.
