Five questions

[chickenfeet]

panjianlien asked:

1. Why Canada and not some other Commonwealth country?

It was basically an accident. Work brought me here. I liked it. I have also lived in Australia and spent a fair bit of time in New Zealand. In both cases I find the remoteness rather daunting. Australia has a great climate but a culture (or lack of it) that I really don't enjoy. New Zealand I like in lots of ways but the smallness is a constraint. So on balance I'll take the accessibility, tolerance and multiculturalism of Canada and, especially, my adopted home, Toronto, despite the shocking climate and the distance from the ocean.

2. How has the shift been going, overall, since you decided to do without a car?

Pretty well. I find i need a car once or twice a week for a few hours which is about what I expected. I haven't had any trouble getting a car when I need one and the whole thing has worked pretty smoothly.

3. What are your favorite specialty foods of the country of your birth, and of the country in which you currently live?

Black pudding! I guess I also miss some of the rather old fashioned prepared foods like potted shrimps and whitebait. As for Canadian specialties, I think I would have to say that some of the artisan cheeses are excellent but that the only thing that I can think of that is a true regional specialty that I like a lot is Mennonite summer sausage.

4. What visual art would you most like to master?

This is almost as abstract as asking me what super-power I would like to have. I guess something book arts related. Either book binding or perhaps an intaglio based illustration technique. I suspect that both though would require rather better drawing skills than I have.

5. What is Lady Jane's most adorable quirk?

She is all adorable quirk! Maybe her habit of landing in my lap at high speed with a noise announcing her arrival which is almost impossible to describe but is something like m'reep. Her carefully escalated way of getting attention when I am typing is pretty funny too.

Comment for your very own set of questions.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

1. Well, boudin aux pommes works nicely... Also, knowing to how work the place. Being instinctively familiar with all those things you have to research living somewhere else - rental law, employment law, driving regulations, what will get overlooked and what you can't finesse. What kind of tone to use with different people to make them like you (essential as a journalist, but also with a plumber!)

And of course I would need to make five times as much practically anywhere else to have the comfortable standard of living I enjoy in Paris.

2. How resistant to change everyone is; how hard it is to get a decision on anything; how difficult it is to simply get PAID. And how political every organisation is. Yes, there are politics everywhere, but 70%, of the energy expended at work in a French outfit is on sterile, mean-minded politics.

3. Oh, it makes me a different person altogether; I have no idea what monolingual Shezan would be like. I constantly adapt my thought processes to three cultures, sometimes more (aspects of German, Israeli, Japanese, depending on where I am staying for a bit at the time, in addition to French-English-American, which are constants.) I'm always aware that there is a world elsewhere, thinking differently. One of the consequences is that I am always a bit of a tourist everywhere, even in France.

One practical consequence is that I've never stayed with expat communities when living abroad; I go native instantly and durably.

4. Chile. That was my great discovery when living in New York, where for some reason the French wines I bought (nice ones too! Gruand Larose! Beychevelle! etc.!) tasted blah. (Dunno if the travel/warehousing killed them, or if they were plain fakes.) But there were very nice, not massively expensively-priced Chilean ones I bought. (Admittedly made by a Rothschild property, Los Vascos...)

5. I enjoy swimming, but I don't have that fish-like ability to glide through the water, getting the breathing and emerging elegantly synchronised just so; I'd like that. One sport I gave up on years ago (it would result in broken bones today) I would have loved to be good at, skiing.