If you haven’t been following my editorials lately, I should inform you that I moved back to Brazil while I wait for a decision on my Canadian permanent residency application (feel free to send a letter to Stephen Harper on my behalf stating what a great person I am and why I deserve to be in Canada).
If you’ve ever had the chance to travel outside of Canada, or even gone to a different province, you would probably agree that it’s impossible not to compare the new place to where you’re from. What’s interesting is that we tend to assume that the way we do things is the norm, and hardly ever stop to think about them.
We only realize some aspects of our own culture once go someplace else.
Think about the habit of holding the door for people, for example. You might think that holding the door is simply common courtesy (and if you thought that, you are a true Canadian). In fact, we can be so over the top in Canada that sometimes we will hold the door for people coming 300 feet away. Then the people coming toward us will start running so that we are not waiting too long, and then both parties will apologize for some unknown reason and wish each other a nice day.
Well… things are a little different in other parts of the world.
As I was holding the washroom door for this man behind me in Sao Paulo, he stopped on the way to look at his phone, completely ignoring me, and then looked up at me with an expression of ‘why are you holding the door and staring at me?’
After I had some time to reflect, I realized I probably scared the poor man. After all, why on earth would a stranger be holding the washroom door with a smile in South America? He was probably convinced I was a psychopath. I guess someone should’ve given me a crash course on South American culture since I obviously forgot all about it.
The other thing I’ve been struggling with since I arrived here is the use of crosswalks. In Canada, even if you’re jaywalking, most drivers will stop and smile at you (or apologize for not stopping sooner). In South America, although crosswalks exist, they have no real use. You can stand next to them for hours and nobody will stop. In the end, you will have to run for your life and hope for the best.
You probably never stopped to think about this, but people even line up differently in Canada, leaving enormous distances between each other. When I was living in Toronto, sometimes I could not walk into the bank because the few people that were in line were so far away from each other that they were literally blocking the door (this actually happened a few times).
When I was in Sao Paulo, on the other hand, I was lining up at the airport and noticed that people were practically glued to my back. I could not understand why everybody was so close together, but then I remembered how the opposite situation had happened in Canada a few years back, so I laughed.
And the last thing (and probably the strangest of all) is the amount of body contact we encounter in Brazil. When we meet new people in Canada we will say ‘hi’ and wave from a safe distance. Sometimes we can be adventurous and shake hands. In Brazil, however, you have no escape but to hug dramatically everyone you come across. The norm is actually to give women two or three kisses on their cheeks (and nobody ever knows how many kisses exactly, so it’s always awkward to meet people).
It’s funny that I only realized how Canadian I had become once I left Canada.