Miamiollarca

Captain’s logbook, April 22nd, 2009. In Good Old Germany the sun is shining, people are having barbecues and celebrating outdoor love. Here in Canada, it finally stopped snowing – but only for the sake of ice-cold rain and bone-chilling winds. To flee from such weathers, we Germans like to fly to a little island in the Balearics called Mallorca – where everybody speaks German, people lie in the sun until their skin peels off, get totally wasted by drinking out of buckets and bring home cheap souvenirs and STDs. Mallorca is technically Germany’s 17th enfant-terrible state – just a little warmer and a little farther south than Bavaria (our other enfant-terrible state). Flights from Germany are cheap, so are the hotels (and I do not mean inexpensive) and it is the perfect holiday destination for the lumpenproletariat!

But although it is cheap, inexpensive and warm, I actually think I either feel too old or too intelligent to enjoy Ballermann 6. And even if I wanted to go there, I couldn’t – because I am in Canada and it is just too far away at the moment... which I have to admit is a damn GOOD thing! Why search every low and high, when good things could not be closer by? East-coast Canadians do not need to go Mallorca, because they have something much more awesome:

Miamiollarca!


Living at the east coast of Canada, going to Mallorca would still be cheap, but not inexpensive any more. Same for the west coast, and going to Quebec would be a total no-brainer, because it is even colder, more expensive and people speak French! Thank got there is this funky little peninsula called Florida – the most inexpensive and awesome destination you can choose from here! It is just a few bucks and a three-hour non-stop flight! The thermometer shows the same number in the twenties as it does in Toronto, but without that creepy minus in front! Palm trees instead of bare-branched maples, sandy beaches instead of frozen lakes and Bermuda shorts instead of long johns! Who needs a hot chocolate when you can have a frozen Margarita? And just a couple of miles farther south, you can visit Cuba (where they have Salsa music and great cigars) or Jamaica (where they have Reggae music and even greater cigars... if you know what I mean ^^).The best part however is that it is a lot like Mallorca, just so much better!

First of all, it is not an island, but a peninsula. That means you can actually go there ever if you are one of these sissies who are afraid of heights. And it is actually situated in an ocean, not that lukewarm bathtub called Mediterranean Sea.

Mallorca 0 – Miami 1.

On Mallorca, there is Ballermann 6, where ugly Germans (and often – even worse – Brits!) with fat bums show their man-boobs and drink all day long till they pass out or go home alone – and that all year long... how frustrating. In Miami, you can enjoy normal and quiet days at the beach every day – at least until Spring Break. Then - young, hot and horny college girls with well-shaped bottoms will take over the beaches, show their perfectly-formed boobs and drink all day long till they pass out and you get to take them home!

Mallorca 0 – Miami 3 (one extra point for girl-boobs)!

Okay... I have to admit that there is a little downer to it. Those of you who aren’t actually geographical retards might have found out that Miami is located in the United States. But come on... nobody is perfect. And unlike Mallorca – where the local residents hate us Germans and think that we are primitive and unsocial primates (which, the way my fellow countrymen behave down there, I can’t blame them for) – people in Miami actually respect you when you tell them you are from Canada. Because they think that Canadians are so liberal, open and progressive... thank got they don’t know better ;)

And many of the people speak the same language you do, although you are a tourist from a different country and most people actually speak Spanish. Just like in Mallorca, but in Miami, not the Spanish speakers are the natives (although they like to behave as if), but those people speaking your language (not German you fool - English!). And if it was up to the native population, they would like to get rid of the Espanola ASAP... so just like the islanders would like to get rid of the Krauts... but it’s the other way around! Hilarious!

And as Miami does not even nearly teem with Canadians as much as Mallorca does with Germans, you actually feel like you are back to a DIFFERENT country when you return. And I don’t mean that because of the obvious decrease in temperature, but because you don’t have to see the same idiots you spent your holiday with when you are back! That’s a hat trick!

So if I look at my score-board, I think I we have a clear winner. In respect of cheap holidays in cool warm places, Canada obviously pwns Germany! Miami is definitely the much more desirable destination for me... and, last but not least, Mallorca does not have the Everglades. In Palma, you might be able to buy a fake alligator leather bag... but in Miami, you can go and hunt one

Viva Miamiollarca!

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50 Cent 4 Life

Yo babe, s’up? Wanna take me to the candy shop and play with my magic stick? No…? Well, neither do I. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a bunch of great rap artists out there… Fifty is just not one of them. But did you ever ask yourself why a cool gangster like Curtis “Shot-Nine-Times-But-Still-Not-Dead” Jackson calls himself "50 Cent"? I mean it is better than Double-Quarter of Half-A-Buck, but still...

Well, I have a theory: Fifty chose his name, because he has a North-American mobile phone. And when he got shot NINE TIMES without dying (goddammit, what an epic FAIL...), he fiddled out his cell phone, dialled 911 with his shaky fingers and thought: Thank god I paid my 50 Cent 911 Emergency Service Fee!

For all of you who – like me – live in a civilized European country like Germany, where you have to be able to drop an emergency phone call even if you use a perfect stranger’s phone and don’t know the PIN number; better take a seat, because here it is once again:
For the “convenience” of calling 911 in a life-threatening emergency situation, North-American (Canada & the US) telecommunications providers make you pay extra every month! For mobile phones the usual fee is $0.50. Feels great, doesn’t it? So... safe... and human! Welcome to the wonderful world of capitalism! But don’t worry, people are not as cruel as you might think and want to play fair. Of course, landlines are charged, too, with up to $3.00 per month!

Thus it is no surprise that Curtis Jackson chose this stupid name. If I wanted to start a gangster-rapper-career after surviving nine bullets, I would want to incorporate this hilarious miracle into my future identity as well. So I'd either name myself after that stupid prick who failed to kill me or – like in Fifty’s case, where the shooter remained unknown (honestly, who wants to admit to be such a loser) – dedicate my street name to the other circumstance that saved my life.

So if you ever want to become an American gangster, be prepared to make money! Not for drugs, bling-bling or hookers, but for life-saving emergency phone services in case you get shot nine fucking times.

Get rich or die tryin’!

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Canada is STILL not the United States

Gosh... it has really been more than two months now that I last posted! But before you think that I am probably the laziest person in the world, here’s to my defence: It actually took me a long time to recover from the hockey-stick beat-up and the maple syrup massacre after my last post, and the mob threatened to make me listen to Avril Lavigne.

To avoid such a special treatment in the future, I thought it would be a nice gesture to encourage Canadians in their national identity of being “not American” by writing this post. Well, as you can see, it took some time to come up with something to support that outlandish theory. However, I eventually found a very good reason to say: Canada is still not the United States, but this can also be a GOOD thing!

Especially for somebody like me, who was born in Algeria and whose last name for some people sounds familiar to the one of America’s Most Wanted, Canada is a much better choice over the United States, because it is much easier to get in! Every time I travel to the US, I “coincidently” get “randomly selected” by the airline for a “special screening”, which of course has “nothing to do with my last name”. So just imagine what would happen if I wanted to study or live in the United States. Even if average Joe wants to get a visa for the US, he has to fill out two visa forms, send in his passport, make an appointment at the consulate, sit through an interview and get all his fingerprints taken. So I bet if I wanted one, I would at least have to go through an additional lie detector test, a rectal examination and fill out twice as many papers.

Not so in Canada! Letter of acceptance, passport copy, visa application form, envelope and stamp – there we go! Six weeks later, and your visa certificate arrives in your mailbox - courtesy of the Canadian embassy. No muss, no fuss. I think both the United States and Amazon Canada could learn a lot from these guys! Easy ordering, fast delivery, no “random selections” at the airport, and not even the Immigration Officer wanted to have my fingerprints when I arrived to Canada.

But it gets even better. If you want to immigrate to the US and are no 16-year-old Chinese programming Wunderkind, you can either try to climb the fence at the Mexican border without getting shot, or find an American who is stupid enough to marry you. If you want to immigrate to Canada and are halfway intelligent – no problem! 'Citizenship and Immigration Canada' came up with a hilarious idea: Who wants to be Canadian? Forget all the other quiz shows, this is the real deal! Take the eligibility test on their page; if you score more than 67 points, you are eligible to immigrate! I actually passed the mark even without having a prospective job offer - amazing! If you then stay for three years and pass the citizenship test: Congratulations! - You are an official citizen of Canada! And you didn't even have to marry an ugly Canadian!

Yet, as great awesome as Canada's immigration policy might, it leaves me with one very inconvenient thought: I have the bad feeling that Canada might soon have to face a huge immigration wave of unemployed potential terrorists – because Canada is NOT the United States, but it is right next door ;)

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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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