Thinking Canada Guest Blog

Intro­duc­tion

For the sec­ond year in a row the CCA is play­ing host to EU stu­dents tak­ing part in the Think­ing Canada pro­gram. Dur­ing the pro­gram, stu­dents spend three and a half weeks tour­ing Canada and learn­ing about our var­i­ous insti­tu­tions before par­tic­i­pat­ing in a two month intern­ship. We asked this year’s stu­dents, Eszter Szenczi from Hun­gary and San­dra Siew­ert from Ger­many, to share some of their ini­tial impres­sions and some of what they have learned so far in their study tour.

Pour la deux­ième année de suite, la CCA accueille des étudi­ants de l’Union européenne dans le cadre du pro­gramme Think­ing Canada. Lors de ce stage, les étudi­ants voy­a­gent 3 ½ semaines au Canada et acquiert des con­nais­sances sur les diverses insti­tu­tions cana­di­ennes. Plusieurs par­ticipent après à un stage dans des organ­ismes. Nous avons demandé à nos étudi­antes de cette année, Eszter Szenczi  de la Hon­grie et San­dra Siew­ert  de l’Allemagne, de partager avec nous leurs impres­sions ainsi que ce qu’elles ont appris lors de leur voy­age. Les blogues sont en anglais seulement.

“You have now left Europe:” A Ger­man Per­spec­tive on Cana­dian Uniqueness

I have only recently joined the CCA as one of two Euro­pean interns for the next two months, but my adven­tures in Canada started about 5 weeks ear­lier when I left my home­town in Ger­many for what would become the most excit­ing, intense (and at times exhaust­ing) expe­ri­ence I am now lucky enough to look back on. Based on an ini­tia­tive of the Euro­pean Net­work for Cana­dian Stud­ies and sup­ported by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, I was one of 32 stu­dents, rep­re­sent­ing 24 coun­tries out of the cur­rent 27 mem­ber states of the Euro­pean Union, on a first-hand aca­d­e­mic and cul­tural mis­sion called the “Think­ing Canada” Study Tour.

After our group’s ini­tial dif­fi­culty at the bor­der and hav­ing been declared “good-to-go,” the first thing I noticed about Canada was how polite peo­ple here are. With that I don’t mean to say that Ger­mans are par­tic­u­larly rude. How­ever, I would argue that you find a dif­fer­ent kind of polite­ness in Canada, which includes a casual chit-chat here and there, that you wouldn’t get in Ger­many unless you knew the cashier in your gro­cery shop around the cor­ner in a famil­iar way. And while speak­ing of gro­cery shop­ping, another sur­prise was the vari­ety of lan­guages I hear while try­ing to find my way through one of those mas­sive stores. I knew about the diver­sity of Cana­dian cul­ture before I came to Canada, but in hind­sight I don’t think I had a proper under­stand­ing of what diver­sity or mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism looks like. Strolling through Chi­na­town in Mon­treal or Toronto, or walk­ing down the streets of Van­cou­ver, improved my com­pre­hen­sion of what being a “vis­i­ble minor­ity” really means.

In the last cou­ple of years, sev­eral Euro­pean politi­cians have observed that mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism seems to be fail­ing on a national basis through­out Europe. Yet, with the Euro­pean Union poten­tially headed toward exis­tence as the “United States of Europe,” I think that Canada offers a good tem­plate for Europe with regard to the cul­tural embed­ding of diver­sity. Although, on this note, I have to admit that, being Ger­man and lov­ing our tra­di­tional dishes, I was dis­ap­pointed to find there is no such thing as a tra­di­tional Cana­dian dish. Hav­ing also stud­ied in Eng­land and just hav­ing cel­e­brated my first Cana­dian Thanks­giv­ing in the com­pany of a mix of Brits, Ger­mans, German-Canadians and Cana­di­ans who enriched the din­ner table with York­shire pud­ding, cherry cheese­cake and the biggest turkey I have ever seen, I can see “diver­sity” out­weigh­ing any other truly Cana­dian dish.

Another thing I noticed while walk­ing around var­i­ous Cana­dian cities was the pres­ence of the his­tory of and the rela­tion­ship with First Nations peo­ples. Both in offi­cial gov­ern­men­tal loca­tions, as well as spread across the cities we vis­ited, dif­fer­ent forms of remem­brance or acknowl­edg­ment of Canada’s First Nations are set up, be it in the form of totem poles, Inuk­suks or other land­marks stress­ing the impor­tance of Canadian-Aboriginal rela­tions. Now you might ask how this is dif­fer­ent from a memo­r­ial in Ger­many, and of course there are many mon­u­ments remind­ing Ger­mans of the World Wars or impor­tant late-medieval fig­ures, yet they dif­fer not only in design, but more impor­tantly in the way the cul­ture of remem­brance is imple­mented. This became even more man­i­fest in some of the Cana­dian muse­ums I vis­ited. Although museum cul­ture in Ger­many is slowly chang­ing, most exhi­bi­tions appear some­what ster­ile in the sense that vis­i­tors can walk around and look, read the infor­ma­tion on info boards or lis­ten to them on elec­tronic tour guides, and then leave again. The Cana­dian cul­ture of remem­brance, on the other hand, seems to have taken on a more Amer­i­can approach, that is to say putting more empha­sis on the pos­si­bil­ity of per­son­ally expe­ri­enc­ing and liv­ing through the his­tory or mat­ter presented.

Think­ing Canada interns San­dra Siew­ert and Eszter Szenczi

I remem­ber that after I had received my accep­tance let­ter to intern at the CCA fol­low­ing my study tour, peo­ple at home kept ask­ing me if I planned on buy­ing a car while in Canada. And although I am sure they were refer­ring to the long dri­ving dis­tances in Ger­many, I believe the big­ger chal­lenge dur­ing my first week trav­el­ling to down­town Ottawa from the sub­urbs was Ottawa’s bus sys­tem. Spoiled by the Ger­man pub­lic trans­porta­tion sys­tem, which is very strict in terms of sched­ules, clearly indi­cated bus stops and elec­tronic dis­play boards, catch­ing a bus in down­town Ottawa dur­ing peak hours seemed like a small-scale apoc­a­lyp­tic sce­nario. Here, all the dif­fer­ent bus num­bers queue up in a (at least to me) baf­fling order, and once spot­ting the cor­rect route num­ber, the bus often dri­ves right by you because it had already stopped, behind all the other busses block­ing your view. Once hav­ing made it onto the cor­rect bus, how­ever, Cana­dian pub­lic trans­porta­tion is thank­fully no dif­fer­ent than in Germany.

Despite some of these dif­fer­ences, how­ever, there are also many sim­i­lar­i­ties between Canada and Ger­many, espe­cially when com­par­ing the issues of the aver­age stu­dent in either coun­try. While in Que­bec, we were lucky enough to meet two speak­ers from CLASSE, who told us about tuition fees and the con­cept of fair edu­ca­tion. Although I wouldn’t agree with every­thing dis­cussed dur­ing this meet­ing, I found their issues with edu­ca­tion to be very sim­i­lar to those repeat­edly dis­cussed not just in Ger­many, but through­out Europe, and espe­cially dur­ing my stud­ies in the UK, which has wit­nessed a trip­li­ca­tion of tuition fees in 2010, whereas Ger­man tuition fees are increas­ingly being reduced to a more rea­son­able amount per term. What sur­prised me was the extent of atten­tion the stu­dent protests were given, not only by the pub­lic but, more­over, by the inter­na­tional media. Recent Ger­man events that received com­pa­ra­ble media cov­er­age were the protests against nuclear power in the begin­ning of 2011, as an imme­di­ate con­se­quence of Fukushima. How­ever, with­out want­ing to include any value judge­ment on the stu­dent protests, I do think that pub­lic debates, as much as cul­tural diplo­macy and cul­tural exchange, are essen­tial to a fruit­ful cul­ture and soci­ety. This is also why this year’s del­e­ga­tion of the “Think­ing Canada” Study Tour was wor­ried to hear that the Depart­ment of For­eign Affairs and Inter­na­tional Trade abol­ished the Cana­dian Stud­ies Pro­gram called “Under­stand­ing Canada” in early 2012, as every­one able to par­take in our study tour has wit­nessed first-hand how impor­tant and valu­able cul­tural expe­ri­ences like these are.

Nev­er­the­less, when think­ing about major dif­fer­ences or sim­i­lar­i­ties between Ger­man and Cana­dian cul­ture or daily life in gen­eral, I can­not say I am expe­ri­enc­ing a huge cul­ture shock. I am con­fi­dent that at least by the time I leave Canada to fin­ish my stud­ies in Ger­many, I will have got­ten used to the bus sys­tem, as well as the dif­fer­ent cur­rency, but not nec­es­sar­ily to the dif­fer­ent way of tax­ing goods and ser­vices and the addi­tional provin­cial sales tax, which still results in sur­prise every time I have to pay for my gro­ceries. But who knows? Maybe there are more sur­prises still to come dur­ing my remain­ing time in Canada. I am look­ing for­ward to every­thing that comes dur­ing my upcom­ing weeks in Canada, and espe­cially at the CCA.

–San­dra