So, we have a new student teacher. She's very, very nice....as all Canadians are. I told my friend Mark (a Canadian himself) how very sweet she was.
"Well, we do have a reputation for a certain dull, sterile niceness... quite unlike you friendly, gregarious Americans,"
he told me, completely nonplussed.
She's a breath of fresh air.
(I'm not sure anybody needs that much fresh air in the morning, however)
Today Mark asks me, "I'm sure this Toronto girl is thrilled to be in your exotic city, right?"
Somehow I doubt it.
She's terrified of the roaches. One day last week she squealed in horror, rushing out of one of the bathrooms. I thought she'd seen a corpse in there. "Oh my gosh, there's a dead cockroach in the bathroom!" She screamed, in the cutest Canadian accent. (By the way, she has never been back to that bathroom since.
Never. )
Later, at lunch she was horrified to near shaking by my coworker Robin's descriptions of nutria. We have lunch with her every day, but she never ever eats the food....she eats two slices of whole grain bread, water and a pickle for lunch. (can you imagine?)
All in all, she seems intrigued.... but disgusted (in a nice, Canadian kind of way, of course) by us all. I can only imagine what my girls must think of her....she's so very different from them (though she is a black female too). She might as well be from a different planet. Hell, *I'm* more "ghetto" (as...uh....parlance puts it) than she is.
Still, I think the culture clash has to be good in a way for both of them (us?), right?
