Canada

OK, so many of you already know this – the title shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who regularly reads this blog or follows me on social media. But I realised that I haven’t explicitly written about it on the blog yet, even though it’s been such a major shift in my life, one that – the more I thought about it – I realised did indeed deserve a post. I wrote about moving to London back in 2013, and then about staying in London after two years, and then again in 2017, when I decided to apply for the Graduate Entrepreneur visa and stay another year. But moving home to Canada? I wasn’t sure if it required any fanfare.

And now, more than six months on, I say fuck that: it deserves ALL the fanfare.

Why is there an Egyptian Sphinx on the roof of the Manitoba Legislative Building? Um, and is the Ark of the Covenant right here in Winnipeg?! The Hermetic Code Tour is one tour you definitely don’t want to miss.

Heading to Canada in winter? Here’s what you’re going to want to wear.

“What’s a Beaver Tail?”

All eyes looked to me for the answer. We stood beside a huge ice sculpture; it was one of many at the Festival du Voyageur, a ten-day celebration of Canada’s fur-trading past and of Winnipeg’s French community. I had gone almost every year as a child, but this was the first time I’d been in Winnipeg in February for a long time. The temperature registered a frigid -31 degrees Celsius, and that was without windchill. My hometown is infamous for being one of the coldest cities in the world, often challenging its residents with a solid few weeks of -40 and below every January and February. We are hearty folk, us Winnipeggers, and we’re damn proud of it. There’s something about the cold that invigorates us, that makes us push out our chests and breathe in deep, as if to prove that we can take it.

It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to post about Thanksgiving every year; I think it’s incredibly important to give thanks. I try to do it daily, but on a day where Canadians are actually given a day off to be thankful, I try to really evaluate all of the positives (and sometimes the negatives, I have been thankful for them, too) in my life.

A beautiful mural depicting social change versus a random tag on a random brick wall – how do we approve one, but disregard the other? The line seems to be drawn somewhere between construction and destruction; the work must take on some form of cultural significance, or, well, at least just look good.