Hello Family and Friends,Here it is at last! We finally have a good phone and internet connection allowing us to keep you up to date on our happenings. It has been a little bumpy here in the beginning getting adjusted to a new place but overall we are enjoying our new surroundings.
FootballMan is surrounded by HOCKEY! His observation is that things are not so different other than regional as if we had moved to another part of the country and he doesn't feel like he is in a foreign country. As long as you can look past the English/French on road signs and food boxes. Kilometers for travel on signs and in car especially when you are used to miles. Celsius vs. farenheit (little lesson in conversion is take the celsius number and double it and add 30 for the temp. in farenheit. So for instance today was 22 celsius so that is roughly 74 farenheit.
Gallons are broken into Liters, oops that's actually Litres here and gas here is sold in litres at 1.33 currently so you do the math, but let me just say "OUCH" for the pocketbook. loonie: the Canadian one-dollar coin; derived from the use of the common loon on the reverse. The toonie (less commonly spelled tooney, twooney, twoonie) is the two-dollar coin. Loonie is also used to refer to the Canadian currency, particularly when discussing the exchange rate with the U.S. dollar; neither loonie nor toonie can describe amounts of money.
Napkins are called serviettes, is this british or french influence? A restroom is referred to as washroom and that is how signs are posted and people will ask to use your wash room. A garburator is a garbage disposal. Runners are tennis shoes. Warm up or track suit is in reference to jogging suit. A chocolate bar means candy bar. Color and honor are spelled colour and honour. A center is spelled centre. Pediatrician is sometimes spelled paediatrician. I must confess at this point there is a European influence I do notice!
Milk that comes in a bag and not a plastic container and is double the price! If you order lunchmeat at the deli counter be ready to ask in grams not pounds. Fabric is sold in meters not yards. There are so many different cultural backgrounds and it is reflected in the isles at the grocery store where an entire isle is dedicated to asian or indian food products, or kosher products. Did you know that if you order a pizza here you can request halal produts? Which means it's kosher! And if you order from a kids menu and want mac & cheese look for it under kraft dinner, that's how it's classified here! One last final difference is the canadian pronunciation of various words, like out, about, house have a long oh sound and appear to sound like oout, aboout or a boot or a boat, and hows. Canadians also like to say "Eh!" Well have a discussion about that next time as well as some interesting statistics about canadians.
Lots of Love from Way up North!
3 comments:
Tee, hee! We must think alike, because my first blog post was So Here We Are. How funny is that?
Snigger, snort! Well we are kinda in the same situation only north vs. south!
What a lovely family!
One language thing that occasionally tripped us (and other visitors) up in Newfoundland was that "dinner" means the noon meal and the evening meal is "supper." So if someone invited us over for dinner we always had to clarify when they were expecting us. There were a lot of other things, too, but I think Newfoundland has even more of its own language than most of the rest of Canada!
Do people there take their shoes off when they go into houses?
I think halal is like the Muslim version of kosher.
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