Canada is NOT the United States

One thing you learn at university is that - if you want to critisize somebody - you start with something positive in the first place and THEN tell him that he is stupid. Well... that's nice and all... but if you ask me, it is more important to put the dog's face into the pee on the carpet right away and not to give him treats in the first place - else the poor thing will never know what it did wrong.

So, Canada is just a neighbouring country to the United States of America and NOT a part of it... and if you ask me, that is the BAD thing! But before every Canadian citizen now starts to chase me with hockey sticks to beat me up and drown me in maple syrup, please let me at least explain.

Canadians are explicitly proud of being CANADIAN and not AMERICAN... but if you ask a Canadian what it actually MEANS to be Canadian... well... then usually the only answer you will get is HOCKEY... or being NOT AMERICAN! To the normal sensible human being this might seem as logical as defining an "apple" as "not a pear". Yet, even worse than the lack of specific attributes for defining an own nationality (and not being American) is the fact that Canada is so freakin' American all the time: They drive the same oversized guzzler cars, eat the same supersize-packaged processed food, share the same country code, speak the same language (almost, eh) and accept the same currency - although they got their own, which actually looks like Monopoly bills. Canadians watch U.S. television and love U.S. sports - they even play in the U.S. leagues! Why?... well, they don't have their own leagues. Actually they have, but they suck. Okay... Canada has a French part, which might distinguish it from America, but the Quebecois would like to be independent anyways and the non-French-Canadians hate French - even though or maybe because everything in Canada is bilingual and you can't even buy shit without having "merde" printed on the package as well.

So no wonder people always tend to confuse the apple with a pear when the apple looks so much like a god damn pear! Yet, the apple doesn't taste like a pear... unfortunately (whoa, all the fruit stuff confuses me). Instead of accepting its fate, Canada still tries to reject the Americanism by all means - and that is where the BAD part starts. McDonald's is as omnipresent in Canada as it is all around the world. But in Canada they printed a small red Maple Leaf in the Golden Arches to show that it is not an AMERICAN McDonald's, but a CANADIAN one... but it is still the same garbage you can eat anywhere else in the world and it is twice as expensive as in the U.S., so what the fuss? Canada had to establish its own Amazon platform so that the patriotic Canadians no longer have to order from the bad bad dot-com-big-brother and I thought "Great, I can buy all my books and electronics and all the other stuff I need online!" because in the U.S. (and in Germany as well btw) you can buy anything from CDs over shoes to sex toys on Amazon and get it deliverd to your doorstep for free. But all you can buy on Amazon.ca are videogames, books and movies - the latter even on VHS tape which I thought would have died out a gazillion years ago!

I think you might get a glimpse of the point I am trying to make. Canada behaves so totally American in its lifestyle and culture, but instead of accepting the facts and enjoying the pleasures of the world of consumption and capitalism, it makes life so much harder and more uncomfortable by rejecting the truth. It is like the high-school-boy who gets a boner everytime he is in the shower with the rest of the football team but still watches "Girls Gone Wild" with a hanger, pretending NOT to be gay!

If you ask me, Canada should get an outing and say "YES, we are American... and we love HOCKEY!" As the French part wants to be seperated anyways, they could just cut of Quebec, ship it over to Europe and attach it to the west coast of France with duct-tape. Canada could then be acquired by the U.S. and become the 51st state. Maybe the U.S. will have mercy and add a Maple Leaf to their flag instead of one more star. Instead of forming an own state, they could also just be put togther with Alaska - they are both damn cold places and since the U.S. election in 2008, we all know that Sarah Palin is a hockey mom, so that should work out perfectly fine (2008 was actually the election year in Canada as well, but guess what, nobody cared)! This way everybody would be happy, I could finally order all my stuff at Amazon and Canada would prevent losing the war against the United States. Which war you might ask right now... well, Canada is not only the second largest country in the world, it also has the second largest estimated amount of oil sleeping under its soil. So as soon as President Obama and his friends find out that coal energy is NOT as clean as they might make Americans believe, they will need more oil. So it is only a matter of time until they fall back into their old habits, come over and invade Canada in order to acquire their oil resources and erase the Maple Leaf from the McDonald's logo.

Well, I gotta go now. The noise of the raging and blood-thirsty crowd with rattling hockey sticks is coming dangerously close and I don't want to drown in maple syrup!

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Oh... Canada

Some of you might be familiar with “The O.C.“ - a once (and for some people maybe still) very popular NBC-TV-Series about a California crash-kid who gets bailed out of jail by a rich Jewish Samaritan lawyer to get adopted by his upper-class Orange County (O.C. for those who are a little slow) family to beat up rich kids at school, to get laid with every girl he meets and to ultimately become an architect after losing his once-in-a-while-drug-addict-love-of-his-life girlfriend who suffers from anorexia in a car accident after chasing a lunatic surfer dude and going to Berkeley after convincing a gay couple to sell their house to his adoptive parents because they once lived in there and just want it back because they are awaiting another child after their house gets destroyed by a huge earthquake – you know… the usual stuff.

So those of you who thought that I was just too stupid to properly spell a 5-letter-title (7 if you count the periods) and hoped “The OhC” would be about this extraordinary television experience (I’m serious, I really liked it), featuring fan-made stories about sexy actors in their mid-twenties who play high-school kids living in a world of sun tan and dinner parties – I am sorry... no... nooooooooooooooooooooooooo... no.


As you might have guessed from the Title, “The OhC” stands for “Oh... Canada”. Yep... this is some kind of a travel blog. And yes... I am currently sitting in Canada in front of my laptop, waiting for university to continue after 12 weeks of strike. And like many of my fellow students who went abroad for one year, I thought it would be nice to tell everybody back on the Old Continent what it is like to live in the land of the Mounties, ice hockey and maple syrup.

But instead of annoying people by posting ALL the pictures I made during my trips or telling them where I went today, what I ate and what I am going to do tomorrow (that's what Twitter is for), I thought it would be much more entertaining and informative to give you an insight into the peculiarities of the country a friend of mine tends to call the "Belgium of America". In the following weeks and months, I will try to tell you about all the things I like here in Canada, giving you guys some insight into topics like everyday life, media and pop-culture. But it would be just half the fun if I only put on my pink glasses and painted little fairies, wouldn't it? So I will of course rant about all the strange stuff that I encountered during the last months which challenged my understanding of sanity and reason and made me appreciate my home country so much more! Here are the rules - every time you see me posting a blog with a picture like the one on top, I will tell you something GOOD about the Canucks and you should imagine the words "Oh... Canada" being sung out in a proud chime by Céline Dion. Every time you read a post with a picture like the one down here, prepare to find out something BAD and imagine the "Oh... Canada" being sighed out by a disillusioned guy who slaps his hand against his forehead while shaking his head in disbelief.

So those of you who are just interested in what's going on in "America Light" - I hope you have fun reading this. For those of you who are planning to come here and are full of enthusiasm about Canada - I hope you will still give it a shot and not change your mind after reading about the strange things that are going on over here. To cut a long story short - welcome to the good, the bad and the ugly sides Canada!

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