Bleepedy Bloops

Did any of you have thoughts about what Canada and/or what Canadians would be like before you arrived? By Canada I mean your new chosen town/city/rural area, wherever that may be in the country. Any preconceptions about what living there would be like?

Former Lancastrian

Well if thinking like Americans they think that we all live in Igloos, use huskies and sleds for transportation, survive on a diet of whale and seal meat and have just discovered AM radio.

http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...l0.1.2.5-1l4l0

jeannie in a bottle

Yes - I thought that the service culture would be excellent, and that I would be living in the 21st Century

Aviator

No

MarylandNed

Well, they'd be dead wrong about AM Radio given that a Canadian invented it. Reginald Fessenden made the first ever AM radio broadcast on Dec 24, 1906.

Novocastrian

I had some distant Canadian relatives who'd once visited my parents in Newcastle and I'd worked with a couple of Canadian scientists, one in Oxford and one in Cambridge.

They all seemed mostly harmless, if a bit naive. So, no, I had no articulable expectations. I came for the job.

dbd33

We expected English and French to be spoken equally. On reflection, we thought all of Canada was Montreal and there's really no wonder in that, I suppose that even now few people outside Canada have heard of another Canadian city.

MarylandNed

I thought Canadians would be generally friendly, helpful and positive...without the arrogance and superiority complex of Americans. In general, that turned out to be true.

MarylandNed

I think most people I have encountered outside Canada have heard of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver at least. It when you start to talk about places like Ottawa (ironic as it's the capital), Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City and Winnipeg that people start to look puzzled.

Novocastrian

I'm quite sure that I'd heard of all those places before I ever contemplated living in Canada.

Perhaps I'm speshul.

I'd add Hamilton, Halifax, St. Johns and Victoria. But certainly not Mississauga, Oakville, Pickering, Oshawa or Richmond Hill.

Bleepedy Bloops

You came for the job and you stayed for the ______

Editha

+1

Editha

I imagined really nice shopping malls full of things to buy, not gloomy dumps that look as if they were built in the seventies, not maintained since, and smell faintly as if someone died there, and the body wasn't noticed for a long time.

I imagined sitting in front of a log fire on cold winter evenings, eating toasted marshmallows, not an electralog.

Novocastrian

I can't think where you got these ideas from. Did you start at a CanadaExpo thingy or whatever they're called?

Novocastrian

The pension.