“It took me a while to feel Canadian,” writes Gael Melville in a recent Globe & Mail essay, describ­ing her expe­ri­ence as an expat who relo­cated to Toronto from her native Scotland.

She bemoans the dif­fi­culty of wad­ing through the bureau­cratic issues:

“What’s a SIN card?” “What’s OHIP?” “Why does the bank charge us for tak­ing our own money out of our account?” …“Why can’t I reg­is­ter to vote?” “Why is my credit card limit a measly $250 when I have the pro­ceeds of the sale of my apart­ment in my bank account?” “Why can’t I use my pro­fes­sional account­ing des­ig­na­tion in Canada?”

But “what proved sig­nif­i­cantly more dif­fi­cult to fix,” she writes, “was the yawn­ing gap in my cul­tural knowledge.”

“Who are the Group of Seven?” “Who are Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen?” Canadians indulged my lack of knowl­edge of the arts with patient expla­na­tions and vis­its to cul­tural sites, but pop-​​culture ref­er­ences were omnipresent and per­plex­ing. “What is the humidex?” “What is a two-​​four?”

What about you? What were your bureau­cratic chal­lenges when you first came to Canada? And what were the gaps in your cul­tural knowledge?

Post a com­ment and let us know.

Photo by odol­phie (flickr)