Monthly Archives: June 2006

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to report that I have at last been able to retire my passport.  I don’t mean that I don’t ever intend to travel abroad again, or that I no longer need a UK passport thanks to having become Canadian; it’s just that, since we arrived here, my passport has been my primary method of identifying myself, and I no longer need it to prove that I am who I say I am.

I imagine there is still lively and energetic debate going on in Britain about the ID card situation, and I’m not particularly sorry to be missing it.  Canada has an ID system, but one you would all recognise – it’s called the driver’s licence.  For most people, and in most situations, your driver’s licence is what you are required to produce when you have to identify yourself.

And that happens surprisingly often.  I have been asked for ID at the post office, the bank, the supermarket (when applying for a frequent-shopper card, not because you need ID to buy avocados), when collecting my new computer from the delivery company, any time I have been buying anything large or expensive, and every time I have had to fill in a piece of official documentation.  And Canada – or this part of it, at least – has a lot of documentation.  I have worked with Italians; I know all about bureaucracy and paperwork, but Canada runs Italy close for the amount of paper involved in doing anything – I even have had paperwork through the post for an entirely online transaction; I downloaded some software, paid for it electronically, installed it on my computer, used it happily for several days, then received a paper confirmation of the whole thing.

Given how often I have had to produce it, then, you can imagine how tired I was becoming of handing people my passport when they were expecting a driver’s licence, and how many times I have had to explain that, no, I don’t have a BC one yet, and yes I will have to sit a test before I get one, and yes, a passport is proof of identity, honest.

From all of which you may gather that I have now passed my dreaded driving test, and I am in possession of a credit card-sized piece of plastic which proves that I am who I claim to be (and even says I have brown hair, when I thought what I had was invisible hair!)

In the end, the test was as comfortable as such a thing could be; I have, after all, been driving perfectly competently for 25 years, and hardly ever hit anything, so I should be able to prove my ability without too much trouble.

And so it proved.  But before getting to the test, I had to adjust to the BC driving experience, which was much more of a challenge than the test itself.  First of all, and most obviously, Canada, unlike many Commonwealth countries, drives on the right.  Now, I have had plenty of experience of driving in Italy, which prepared me for this, and it was only a matter of a few hours before I was remembering where my mirror was, and what side the handbrake was on.  Unfortunately, driving in Italy is so completely different from driving here that, in all other respects, it was completely useless to me.  For example, in Canada, speed limits, while not universally respected, are at least acknowledged and paid heed to; lane markings serve to separate lanes of traffic, rather than decorate the road surface, and stop signs cause traffic to come (more or less) to a halt.  And there are a lot of stop signs.  Italy has become infested in recent years with the British invention, the roundabout – here they have 4-way stops.

I won’t pretend otherwise – the 4-way stop is a truly terrifying beast to the British driver.  Until quite recently, I was expecting everyone else on the road to drive in the British ‘me first’ style; it took a long time to realise that other drivers at 4-ways were actually waiting for me because it was my turn!  I carefully read all the rules for these intersections, but I’m afraid I still am not clear what happens if four vehicles arrive simultaneously – presumably, they all wait until one of them decides that progress is more important than being polite.

Other hazards awaiting the unwary Brit include the very sensible, but equally scary, ‘right on red’ rule, where you can legally go through a red light if you are turning right, there are no pedestrians in the way (pedestrians rule here), and you feel brave enough.  It is, I have been reliably told, perfectly legal to go left on a red if you are turning on to a one-way street; perhaps I’ll leave that until the day I no longer feel like I am breaking the law just by turning right.

Possibly the biggest difficulty I have faced (apart from the road surface, which I will return to when I’m feeling braver!) is the school zone.  Now this is a very sensible invention, whereby areas around schools are protected by a 30kph speed limit, which is to say, traffic is supposed to go at only very slightly above a light jog. Often in a school zone, I have been overtaken by elderly ladies walking arthritic dogs.

The school zone is announced by a luminous sign, which is difficult to miss; if ever anyone is pulled over for speeding in a school zone, there can be no excuse about not having seen the sign; it remains burned into the retinas for several minutes.  However, there is no sign announcing the end of the school zone – instead, one is supposed to look out for the back of the sign for opposing traffic.  Which is often behind a tree, lamp post or arthritic dog.  I am genuinely surprised not to see more people trundling along for miles at 30kph, searching in vain for the back of a sign on the other side of the road.

Despite all of the above, the test was passed with no real problems (apart from inexplicably clipping the curb before my 3-point turn); I even got an ‘Excellent Job!’ written on my form.  And now I have proof that I can drive as well as proof that I really do look like this.

RIchard

June 2006

Dear Friends,

We passed a test last weekend.  Not the driving test, that’s still to come – the whole subject of driving here is being left until that particular trial has passed – but a test of what you might call residence; an indication of how we are settling in to life here..

Last weekend was a holiday weekend; I imagine that most, if not all, countries have at least one long weekend in May, and Canada’s excuse is Queen Victoria’s birthday.  No, I don’t know why, but it seems to be a typically Canadian thing to do. People asked me if Britain celebrates it, and I had to confess that although we have two May holidays, they celebrate the beginning of May, and then, much later, the beginning of spring.  Now I read it, that doesn’t really make much sense to me either.  I have tried to explain the phenomenon of local holidays, but I’m getting tired of watching people’s eyes glaze over.

So, we had a long weekend, and we thought it was about time we got out and started to explore this country.  We have almost completed all the major furniture purchases (although I’d better get on and buy a barbecue before the summer is over!), and the soccer season took a break for the holiday, so we were free to do what we wanted.

If I’m honest, we really needed a break, too. I think I sometimes give the impression in these letters that this has all been relatively plain sailing, and that we are just swimming serenely on, but of course, there are stresses and strains, and even though our new routine is only a few weeks old, we really needed a change from it.

So we decided to go to Jasper.  Since we arrived, we have been tantalised by glimpses of the Rockies in the distance (or what we assumed were the Rockies; it’s remarkably difficult to get one’s bearings in a new geography), and Jasper is the place – we were told by many people – to get the authentic mountain experience.  It’s not that far, our friends would tell us – just a short hop, really – and full of interesting and exciting things to do.

Here we come to one of the key differences between our two countries.  A short hop in Canadian terms is equivalent to driving from our old house in the south of England to Carlisle – a journey which would take half a day, and use some of the busiest roads in Europe, passing several major cities on the way.  Here, we set off early on Saturday morning, and once we were out of the environs of Prince George, did not pass another major (or even minor) road, never mind city, town or settlement, for over 2 hours.

Eventually, the town of McBride loomed into view through the rain.  Yes, it was a long weekend; it rained, what did you expect?  McBride is where things got really Canadian.  For a start, all the sidewalks – and many other things – were painted blue, and to explain why would take longer than I have space for.  Enough to say that it’s about hockey, and I’m only beginning to understand how deeply hockey lives in the Canadian psyche.  We stopped at the railway station for a snack – the station has been converted into a kind of museum-cum-gift shop-cum-restaurant, although it still functions as a station as well – and wondered when we were going to see any mountains.

As we pressed on, we passed Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, although what we saw was cloud and rain.  Eventually, we made it over the Yellowhead Pass and down into Jasper.

This was our first experience of another province, and because all the license plates on the vehicles are different, and the town itself is kind of alpine-looking, and therefore quite different to Prince George, we felt for a while that we were in another country – it really was like being abroad.  We parked, and explored, and the rain began to ease, and then we came to our big test.

Naturally, when people hear our accents, we become objects of curiosity (although in a nice way), and there are a regular set of questions we expect; first of which is always “So, where are you folks from?”  Until now, this has led to lengthy discussions about the UK (no, not the Ukraine!) or Britain, or the difference between England and Scotland, and more often than not, the follow-up question “So, are you the guy who’s writing in the paper?”

However, we were in a shop in Jasper, we felt like we were on holiday, and when the question was asked this time, Zoë said “Prince George”.

And I realised it was true – we’ve been here since the beginning of April, when there was snow on the ground, and now the summer is almost here; the boys are about to finish their strange, disjointed, school year, and we do come from Prince George now  We’re a long way from being natives, we’re even a long way from being entirely comfortable with simple things like the language differences (and remind me to write about that sometime), but it feels like we’ve passed stage 1 of our adventure; we’re here, and it doesn’t feel odd to say that we live here now.

The rest of the weekend was wonderful; Jasper is a great place, and the sun came out.  We walked on a glacier (and fell into it); we got higher up a mountain than any of us has ever been before, and on the way home, we saw black bears grazing at the side of the road, which is kind of what we’d been hoping for.

We even saw Mount Robson without the cloud surrounding it: they have big mountains here.

Or should I say, we have big mountains here?

RIchard

May 2006