Variations of 'Canadian Experience'

Everybody -- jobseekers, workers, employers, managers, business owners, anyone who dreams and dreams big -- talks about "Canadian experience" as if it's the bible from where bursts bits of wisdom to guide the quest for a new life in Canada.

Well, I've had my Canadian experience in a way that broadened my understanding of parts of this "kanata", to which First Nations people called their village, and later referred to as Canada by white settlers.

February was perhaps the most inopportune time to come to Toronto from the summer paradise called San Diego, California. It was the height of winter, yet those in the know said that month and the next were milder than previous winters.

I wasn't going to argue that. I was freezing. My speech was a stutter of keywords. My ears were numbly crisp. My hands were forever buried in my outsized pockets. Despite all those, I let the soft and tiny snowflakes to fall and cover my face.

Quite a dramatic change. Over in the Philippines where I was born, and in America where I stayed for 16 years, it's the rain, raindrops, grains of water, that dropped on my face. And when Mother Nature deigned to be generous, she let out a splash, then an inundation.

The images of people shoveling snow, of motorists struggling to drive in mountains of slippery white, of people garbed and covered with layers of clothings, of parched trees wrapped in white powder -- I've seen them all from a distance as wide as the oceans.

In my eyes, they're images, not reality that one can touch and feel. My arrival in Toronto on that cold February night changed all that.

In one sudden moment, the phrase "Canadian experience" took a whole new meaning. It meant not a quick immersion in everything Canadian and try to live it; it meant being totally in a new environment. The weather, the people, the culture, they're all different from what I knew and learned.


My first Canadian experience was in Niagara just a week into my arrival. The falls was pretty much archived in my memory, my scant knowledge of it gained from readings and from films. And here I was, transposed in time and space, savoring its beauty in the harshness of winter.

My only idea of water being frozen was from refrigerators and freezers. Niagara changed that too. The entire length of the river where the water flowed was all ice, fragile ice, white non-transparent ice.

The trees that once had verdant plumage now looked like skeletons of white, so eerily beautiful, so fascinatingly charming.

Suddenly again, images of white Christmas trees from my youth evaporated. I smiled knowing now. Then, artisans covered shredded trees with coats of white paint to simulate snow. I never really imagined how trees could turn white. But now I know.