Canadutch
So the floor tiles arrived and we went to the store to pick them up. Xander’s friend drove us and he wouldn’t let me get out of the car because of my back. Thoughtful, but in the end a huge mistake.
He brought them out to the car and when I looked at them I thought, hey.. these aren’t the tiles I ordered! The color just looked wrong somehow.. I said I was going to go in and look at the ones on display compared to the ones we got. Again, wouldn’t let me out of the car and said he’d go look. He came back saying it was the same one.
We get home with the tiles and when I look at them against the ones we have on the wall I’m still sure this isn’t the same ones I looked at in the shop. Plus, the reciept I have from when I paid for the order says LEXUS and the box says VILLA. Something isn’t right.
What irritates me most is that every time we want to do the TINEST FUCKING THING we have to get someone to drive us because these big DIY shops are all in really inconvenient places that aren’t that easy to get to with public transit. I think back to my beautiful MX3 I had in Toronto for such a short time before packing my life up and moving here and I just want to cry, and I usually do.
To Xander, asking people for drives for simple things is no big deal. To me it’s humiliating and irritating… where I come from if you don’t get your license when you turn 16 you’re weird. If you don’t have your own car by the time you are in your 20’s.. you’re just a complete loser. Maybe that’s superficial or your typical “North American Materialstic Bullshit” but I don’t give a shit…. At least North Americans can get their own goddamn fucking tiles without having to bug the neighbours to take them.
I know a lot of people would think I really shouldn’t say anything considering I don’t have a job here and wouldn’t be able to contribute to a car financialy even if we did have one and that Xander prob has his own complaints about that… but whatever. If he wants to bitch he can write his own blog about it. I had a job and a car once.. and I gave it all up to come here to this retarded country.
I love him and if I didn’t think he was worth it I wouldn’t be here… but dammit… sometimes I just want to click my heels and go back in time to when life felt normal…
/rant off
Canada is my home… Canada will always = good no matter what the situation. I don’t love it here, I tolerate it… there are times when I can deal, and there are times when I would chop my right arm off to be home. This is one of those times.. and this is where I vent about it.
You have been here a matter of months, and you have a family here to support you. You have MANY things I didn’t have when I came here. So it’s a little hard to compare our experiences, I think.
When you have been here six years and the tourist phase has worn off, there may be things you are sick of too.
I don’t know about Canada, but I think it would be similar to my country. In Australia a car is required for everyday life, the cities are designed with the assumption that everyone travels by car. So everyone does drive.
Now I live in the Netherlands and I do not have a car. I do not need a car, everywhere I need to go I can get to by bike or train. The cities are old, and developed before cars. For day-to-day living there is absolutely no need to have a car.
Of course there are always exceptions, and things such as needing to get tiles are made much more practical with a car, but is such an infrequent requirement a justification for the expense?
So I think it is unfair to say Canada = has cars = good, Netherlands = no cars = bad. People in NL don’t have cars because they don’t need them, whilst in canada you do. In Australia we have air conditioning, in NL they do not, because it is not needed here. Sure there might be a few days of the year where it would be nice but on the whole it is not required. That doesn’t mean that NL is worse than Australia because there is no air conditioning.
You once advised me “don’t let yourself get hung up on the things you don’t have here that you had at home”.