No ups without downs

So, all of my posts so far have been about how we’ve been settling in to living in Canada and all the great things that have come along with it. And I have to say that for both Joonas and I this has been one of the best experiences of our adult lives and we couldn’t be happier that we made the decision to move here and try to make it in the Big World without our support system at an arms length.

While everything has gone really well and we’ve settled in nicely, there is obviously aspects to living here which aren’t great.And so I thought I’s share a couple of thoughts on those things as well, rather than always post about ”the ups” so to speak.

Quite obviously one of the hardest things about being here is the fact that our most cherished loved ones – both family and friends – are so far away. Having the technology we have now with Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype etc. the world really is a smaller place than it once was, but they dont keep you connected to people on an everyday level. You can’t hug people through whatsapp or share a meal through Facebook so, although we hear from people and try our best to send messages, it’s obviously not the same. I was uprooted from my friends so many times as a kid that I thought this would just be one more move, but it’s different as an adult. As a kid I always had my brothers around when we were friendless in a new country and then when you did make friends it was easy to move on from missing your old ones. I think as an adult you understand that living away from people also means that you are missing some really important milestones in each other lives. Also, the people who you choose to keep in your life as an adult are infinitely more important than that fourth grade best friend who changed once every three weeks. We have been super lucky though in the sense that we have had people visit us, which has tremendously alleviated our homesickness! We also Skype my parents every week or so and go through whats happened on both sides of the world and we also have numerous active whatsapp groups. One of the best things here is – thanks to the time difference – waking up in the morning with our phones full of notifications of messages, emails and photos that we’ve been lucky enought to receive from back home!

An every day thing here which has required alot of learning is the working culture. First of all, it is completely normal for people to commute to work for over an hour. Distances here are so huge and traffic so insane that people sit in their cars for ridiculous amounts of time. Joonas coomutes for about 35-45 minutes and my trip to work takes 70 minutes, combined on a bad day thats almost 4 hours of going from point A to point B.

Whats also weird here is that you are evaluated on the amount of time you are physically present at your work place rather than how productive you are during that time. It drives me crazy that sitting at your desk streaming a sports game or watching a tv show is less frowned upon than leaving work early – and by early I mean after 3.30 but before 5. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m trying to implement some of my own personal work culture into our work place here and try to leave 8 hours after I get in and refuse to sit in the office just for the sake of being present. I think this is something that needs to be dealt with throughout North America and alot of the locals also agree that the norm here needs to be re-evaluated.

Next on the list are the buildings. Anyone who has been to this part of the world will know that in comparison to Scandinavia, the buildings here are horrible. Alot of them are just old, but they are also maintained using a ’bandaid’ type mentality, where rather than fix the cause they just fix the symptom. As a case in point, our apartment! We live in a 14 story building that is fairly old, but our superintendent does a pretty good job as keeping it presentable. However, this spring has brought about alot of rain and last week when the rain was pouring down and the winds were blowing, the side of our building leaked. Yep, the rain water saturated the outer brick of our building and came in through the wall. As a result, the paint on our bedroom wall, the guest room wall and the ceiling of the guest room have now blistered and are falling to the floor. Great! So whats the solution, strip away the blistered shitty paint, paint over it and wait for the next rain. It’s super frustrating! But this kind of thing happens all over the place, at work we had a leak in the ceiling and the ceiling panel was drooping with water. Rather than fix the issue, they simply changed the panel. But on the upside, things get sorted out really fast, which is nice!

Socially, one of the harder things to learn has been the necessity to evaluate how appropriate the thing I am about to let out of my mouth is, before I let it out. For someone who isnt particularly politically correct, learning to live an an overly PC culture has been challenging! Although the PC culture here is funny, it’s weird little things. Like this week we were talking about the movie ’Get out’, which has an African American main character. As I was explaining this I was told to simply use the adjective ’Black’ for this specific character. For me, that is super uncomfortable and racist, but here it’s fine. But then if you add any type of sexual inuendo to a joke, that is bad. I also used the term ’invalid seating’ when describing the special seating on the bus, and aparently thats not okay – it should be referred to as handicapped seating. It’s also strange, at least amongst ’young’ people, swearing is very prevalent, but you have to be aware of what swear words you are using as some are considered heinous whilst others are just considered adjectives amongst any other word.

There’s not much I would change about Canada – and although today is a bit of whiny/cranky post, we absolutely love it here! If we could just sprinkle the tiniest bit of clean cut scandinavian architecture, some Finnish bluntness and brutal honesty, and the best parts of the swedish working culture into this already weird crockpot of cultures, I would say we could reach perfection!

As a mood lightener, here are our top five things about Canada:

1. Canadians – They really are THE nicest people on the planet. No joke!
2. The Diversity
3. The carefree and relaxed lifestyle
4. The food (and drink)
5. The anonimity – having your own language in a foreign country is fantastic!

That’s all for now! Keep it real my friends!
-Elli

Next time on 730 Days, Eero’s trip to Toronto! Stay Tuned!