Tag Archives: Cultural Differences
Cultural Differences V
Sometimes the differences can be surprising. Canada switched to the metric system in 1975, so I wasn’t anticipating any problems in the kitchen – I know how metric measurements work. I figured I could read the numbers on the packaging. The problem started when we started purchasing things for the kitchen. Pots and pans were […]
Cultural Differences IV
In North America it is common for retail salespeople to wear name tags. Turns out they do in Germany too, but there’s a big difference. The name tag is so much a part of the uniform that those wearing them often forget they are there. If I see a clerk wearing one I tend to […]
Cultural Differences – II
In North America time is money. We are always looking for ways to save it; it may be the most valuable thing we own. Europe runs at a different pace. That was obvious the first time I went to a gas station to fill up the car. We had borrowed a car to run some […]
Cultural Differences – I
I mentioned not long ago that I was planning on doing a series of posts on cultural differences I had discovered between living in Canada and living in Germany. I’ve got a few posts started, but nothing finished yet. Then I remembered. When I started this blog most of my posts were reflections on a […]
More Than Culture Shock!
Today’s predicted high temperature in Damascus, according to the BBC is 18 degrees Celsius. Today’s predicted high in Ottawa is -22 degrees Celsius. With the wind chill it will feel like -36. We have hundreds of newcomers in Ottawa, refugees escaping the fighting in Syria. Everything here is new to them, the language, the food, […]
Does This Sign Belong Here?
Canada is a bilingual nation, though in parts of the country that is more theory than fact. When I was younger both England and France were acknowledges as our founding nations, and English and French were our national languages. Now it is more complicated, and it is commonly understood that Canada’s aboriginal population, the First […]
What Is A Platonic Solid?
There is a television game show called “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?” I’ve always felt I was, so I have never bothered to watch it. My niece turned 14 last weekend, so naturally there was a family gathering. When our family get together talk invariably turns to school, and she was asked what […]
LeRoux III – Dinner In Detroit
The guys wanted barbecue, which obviously meant something different from my understanding of the word. They were from Louisiana after all, and I gathered this was some sort of southern cooking, not sticking hot dogs on a grill. I had met up with the guys in LeRoux (see the previous two posts) and they wanted […]
Different Approaches
I was flabbergasted at the words of the British woman who was showing me around the lifeboat station. We were in the English town of West Mersea, and there was an open house at the local station of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Never having been in such a place before (Ottawa is a long […]
Black Friday
Today, if you didn’t already know, is the day after the American Thanksgiving holiday, which for the past 50 years or so has been referred to as Black Friday. It is an orgy of consumerism, a shopping frenzy with supposedly lower prices and longer store hours and chaos in shopping malls across the USA. It […]
random thoughts from lorne 
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