It is nearly a year since we first landed in Canada (April 23, 2008) and I couldn't help but wonder how much I have changed since then. I remember being nervous the first few times I rode the bus transport and had to say to the driver, "transfer please", without really understanding what it meant, only because my uncle told me to say so, so that I could ride free on my trip back. It took me a while to grasp the concept of riding the next bus rides (no matter how many) for the next two hours for free when I've paid for every single public transport ride all my life.
I definitely am not the same person as I was a year ago. I guess that is what moving to another country does to you. Here are some of the other things I noticed about my experience.
Signs that I am changing into being somewhat similar to being a Canadian:
1] I find myself often going to work carrying a hot coffee mug in one hand.
It never occurred to me till I got here and saw all these early commuters with a cup of coffee in their hands, that you could bring coffee to work. I never had to, as we had a huge canteen inside our workplace back home that could supply 6,000+ people with its myriad choices of coffee flavors any time of the day at partly subsidized price. Here, we don't have canteens inside the workplace buildings and buying coffee outside is a bit more expensive than bringing your own brew.
2] I check the weather channel before I decide what to wear, everyday.
With what seems like an every changing weather here in Victoria, one has to check what the weather forecast is for the day else you run into major inconveniences with unsuitable clothes and freeze to death. Back home I could nearly predict what the weather would be by looking at the sky and it was mostly sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny for most of the year and rainy, rainy, rainy, rainy for the months of June-August. And if I make a mistake with my self predicting, the worst that could happen is get wet but still be warm.
3] I shout "thank you!" to the bus driver when I get off at the backend of the bus.
I honestly think, I got 80% more polite since coming here to Victoria. I've instinctively learned to say "thank you", "Please", "I'm sorry", smile politely to strangers and have the gall of asking people I don't know, of how they are doing. I think people would mistake me as a politician if I were back home.
4] I could now answer fluently, the multiple choice questions that most people in the food industry here bombard me with.
It is unbelievable how far I have gotten with my multiple question answering skill and no longer answer a question with a question anymore. It was a long process of soul searching if I was cracker jack cheese person or a white cheddar one, having no idea what each of those choices are like. I still remember being intimidated (and would prefer starving) ordering in fastfoods that don't have a number on a set of choices that they have on their menu like what we have back home where our meals are already "pre-ordained" for us for the most part and all I have to do is say a number. Now I could proudly say that I know who I am. I am a turkey sandwich on wheat, with white cheddar, lettuce, tomatoes, green pepper, mayonnaise, honey mustard with no onions and olives kind of person.
5] Like most Canadians, when I see snow falling outside, I now express my slight dismay for the prolonged cold weather and mumble something like "go away already" instead of jumping around and squealing "Snow! Snow! Wowee! Let's go outside!"
(I realized that this blog entry would be quite long if I enumerated all the signs, so I'll stop at five for now and will write the rest in future blog entries.)
A colleague had asked me, so you are already a year here, do you feel like you have fully adjusted? I would say "no" to that. I think that if there were big stones and small stones to this thing, it's the big stones that I have quickly learned to change and adapt. But I still find myself struggling (hilariously) with the small stones of daily living. They say that the devil is in the details, I agree to that. The devils are in the smallest details.
"The Battle of the Padlock"
It so happens that my colleagues and I have been working on a project which required us to work in the far dungeons of a highly secure data research center where we had to leave all our belongings in the lockers outside the room's door. My colleagues (both of them are Canadians) have decided that we'll all use one of the big lockers to place our things in for the month that we would be working there and one of them have provided a padlock to secure that locker. Now this was a padlock that has those circular plastic round knobs in the center, and numbers around it like in the vault and you turn that knob around to the codes to open it. One of my colleagues gave me those codes and quickly showed me how to open it by which I saw her mostly swirling the knob around and had thought to myself - Oh, that's easy. It wasn't. The next day, I tried opening it, I couldn't open it. I used the codes, with no luck, I pulled and twisted and had my fingers sore and nearly bleeding but it never budged. I kept at it for as long as my pride could handle (which was a long time) before I called my colleague from inside that very silent and secure vault-like room, twice (to my utmost embarrassment), to ask her to show me how to open it. I didn't know that I had to turn it counter clockwise and then clockwise in certain order and with distinct number of turns. I didn't know that if you pulled it too hard (especially with desperation), it would lock itself and not budge anymore. For all I know, padlocks (at least the ones we use back home) had keys!
So if someone asks me about my experience or advice on immigrating, I would tell them that most of the "big stones" you'll encounter, you would already know about from the seminars and from what your friends tell you or what you'll read in the web. And for sure you would have yourself psychologically prepared to face those kinds of stuff. But there are the presence of certain "padlocks" in these roads, those small and tiny details that could ruin your day, which come unexpectedly and would most probably catch you unguarded. And the best thing to do, I'd say, when you are faced in a battle with an evil looking, annoyingly haughty and horribly mocking "padlock" is to laugh. (I know my colleagues and I had a very good one.)
No comments:
Post a Comment