I’ve always felt this kind of weird connection to Canada. I’m not sure exactly where this started, I’ve been actively following Canadian politics since 2015 something that I’ve only done for a handful of countries. In 2022 I started watching baseball (weird, right?), I completely arbitrarily chose to support the Toronto Blue Jays, further deepening the amount of Canadian culture I consumed. Later, most of my friend group from school spent a year working abroad on a ski resort in Banff, Alberta - while they were there I spent a chunk of my first year at uni dating a half Canadian girl. It just keeps happening to me.

A top tip for anyone in university: befriend the international students. They work brilliantly as free accommodation if you want to visit the country you’ve been trying to go to for a decade. Of course, it helps if they are Nicole and Abbey, who fully live up the stereotype of Canadians being some of the most obscenely and unnecessarily nice people in the world.

I’ve found Canada’s unique, surprisingly insular culture as a parallel to Britain in some ways, a culture consisting of a floating mix of global American media combined with a strongly unique and persistent local culture. An interesting observation I’ve made is that Britain and Canada are parallel in that a not insignificant amount of their culture is defined as being “not America”.

In some ways I kept having this strange feeling of uncanny valley, Ontario is as close to UK as any other place I’ve visited, but it was all just slightly off. Looking out the window and seeing something that could be like the UK, but just isn’t quite there.

I can and will write more about these topics later, but for now I want to write a holiday blog, so… While I was in Ontario I maintained a list of “observations”, just bits and bobs I noticed while I was there:

The supermarket experience

By far the most famous Canadian supermarket oddity is of course bagged milk. I’ve been aware of this for years and so I was mentally prepared for buying our milk in small bin bags (and honestly? bagged milk makes a lot of sense, I totally get it).

Departure boards are alphabetical

The departure boards in both Toronto Pearson and Montreal airport are sorted alphabetically rather than, I don’t know, by time. This is easily one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. I can’t even begin to explain how unhelpful this is. There is no priority given to the time of the flight, if your flight to London is in 5 minutes and the flight to New York is in 3 hours, the New York flight will be displayed first. It’s so stupid.

Biggest cars and roads I’ve ever seen

Holy shit. My friend picked me up in (what I believe was) a Ford F150. I had to climb into that thing. It felt like driving around in a literal tank.

Speeding is basically legal

The speed limits in Ontario are essentially just suggestions. There is no ANPR speed cameras of any kind. The only way you can get a speeding ticket is to be physically caught speeding by a police officer and have them bother to pull you over and physically hand you a ticket.

2 hours isn’t a long drive

The drive I do every couple months from my university in Leeds back home to Solihull is about 2 hours~, and this is a pretty long drive in my opinion. I have done there and back in one day but I really don’t like to. More often than not I take it easy and stop for a quick break halfway through to stretch my legs.

In Ontario? My friend Abbey regularly does 5+ hour drives without stopping. This is absolutely mental to me, I even quite enjoy driving and even I cannot imagine anything worse.

Much easier to buy weed than alcohol

In Ontario the only place you can buy alcohol is in particular stores regulated by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). These are dedicated stores that only sell alcohol and are completely state owned and ran. Meanwhile you can walk down pretty much any street in Ontario and pickup weed from one of countless privately owned and ran stores!

I am personally in favour of weed legalisation, but even this seems kind of mental to me.

Patrol is basically free

Petrol (aka “gas”) is around 85p~ per litre in UK money. The cheapest I have ever paid for petrol is 130p~ per litre in the UK.

Fanta is bad. Lemonade is good

In Canada “Fanta” is this horrible neon orange drink that tastes like absolute shite. Nothing like the bright yellow drink we have in the UK. It looks (and tastes) a bit like piss.

Meanwhile, “lemonade” is the lovely fresh drink we would call “cloudy lemonade” that you can only get in particular restaurants. I adore fresh lemonade and I was so happy to find out it’s super common and easy to find drink in Canada. They don’t know how lucky they are.

“Jaywalking”

Look, I am no stranger to a slightly-dangerous run across a busy road, I do it literally all the time. But in Canada? This is actually legitimately frowned upon. I spent my first day in Toronto on my own and I was just crossing whatever road whenever I felt like it, just like I would at home. On the second day I went in with my poor friend who was horrified and actually told me off for crossing the road when the pedestrian light was red even though it was perfectly clear.

Car locking is scary

In the UK locking a car makes this subtle “click” noise. In Canada it makes this loud, aggressive “HONK” noise that makes me literally jump every time it happens.

Credit cards

Credit cards are much more a “thing” in Canada than they are in the UK. Some people in the UK have one but it’s not super common. In Canada it’s the norm to pay for almost everything with a credit card, there are even some places that only accept credit cards, which was incredible inconvenient for me as I don’t have one yet.