First impressions

To Mark & Nancy, sorry for the wait.

As we arrived in Winnipeg that Friday night I was eager to see how Canada, or even North America  looks like. It sounds stupid, but I really had no expectations or idea what I was about to see. As we drove along multiple highways a relatively short distance from the airport to the hotel, I was staring out of the window hoping to get a grip of what my new surroundings were like. The "highways" themselves were something new to me, and I saw signs with strange company names flashing by me in the dark night. Houses were different, oddly placed right next to the busy streets. Suburbs everywhere; some really nice, some reminded me of tiny white matchbox houses. 

I had been told that as soon as I would get to North America I would notice that people are bigger, on average. The Fast Food Nation of the world surely has given its children some extra baggage, but this wasn't something I noticed in Canada. People weren't that heavy, everyone looked normal to me. Maybe the difference wasn't as striking as it might be when arriving in, say China, where some people would be shorther than myself. And well, it's not like Europeans are all tall, skinny and healthy.

One of the first things that I noticed was that people were very friendly. By this I don't mean that the flight attendant on plane or waitress at a restaurant asked me if I wanted some more coffee extra many times - I mean that people very genuinely friendly, no phoney small talk in Canada. This was something I had never thought about, the nature of Canadian people. Somehow from my European perspective I had assumed Canada to be the northern part of North America, the cool (in both meanings) country straight north from the U.S. In my past I have never really wanted to visit the USA, yet somehow I've created a crush for Canada - this country I apparently knew very little about.

Winnipeg wasn't anything that special as a city (although I did not know this was the city where the famous Winnie the Pooh comes from), but it was a North American city. Everything was just so very different in comparison to all the European cities I've been to. As I walked around downtown I spent my time simply looking at the buildings and the architecture, reading the signs for brands and shops I had never heard of and wondering how can it be possible that I felt more "home" in some Asian city than here. On my way back to the hotel I felt strange joy each time I saw a familiar sign from the bus window, belonging to some big American chain I recognized from a TV show.