“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)