After living here for some time I thought you might be interested to hear how it is to live in a Canadian house. If you had the image of a tidy, snow-white Canadian house, forget it. You watched too many commercials for detergents. It is impractical to clean because Canadian houses are huge. I mean, in some houses the basement alone is the size of a soccer stadium. Most Canadians wouldn’t even consider an apartments building as an appropriate place to live. That’s not to say that there aren’t very clean houses. But you can imagine what it is like to clean a ten-room house. Many houses have their junk thrown somewhere, either in the basement, attic, or backyard. In a sharp contrast, workplaces, where people spend most of their time, are very clean. Here cleaning is a profession, often mastered by immigrants. It is not thought at school, so the young generation of Canadians simply doesn’t know how to do it. They really have a problem with the sophisticated equipment. Have you ever seen people trying to clean the floor with a vacuum machine? I did, and they seem to have been satisfied with the results. Ridiculously as it may sound, it is difficult to find here a good broom. They have mop, they have Swiffer (a one-time towel that is attached to the stick), but nobody in a dusty country would consider them as serious alternatives to sponja (which they don’t have).
There are many reasons why the houses are so big. There is no shortage of land. They need large houses because they are stuck at home in the winter. They are construction masters. Here construction is a serious profession and business. There are even TV shows on construction, internal design, do-it-yourself and don’t-try-this-at-home. In a modern house, the internal walls are made of drywall. The external walls are made of metal or wood frame filled with insulation material. Think of cardboard houses.
That brings me to the fire phobia. The national nightmare of Canadians is to wake up in the middle of the night trapped in a burning house. To pass the nightmare to newcomers they made some laws. There is a law that the main door must be opened from the inside without a key.
There is a law to install smoke alarms. We even had a visit of firemen going from door to door reminding people to replace their smoke alarm battery, and asking to make a plan to meet outside at agreed place so that in case of a fire we’ll know how many people are trapped inside. When there is a false alarm in my building at the university the building is evacuated and only firemen are allowed to clear the alarm.
In a Canadian house you don’t live alone. There is nature around, and sometimes nature crawls in. Squirrels find ways into the roof. In the summer we host Canadian spiders weaving perfect octagonal nets. In the cold winter we get gray mice. They dig the walls, the floors, and run from house to house. In four years there have been many people in the 7-bedrooms house I live in. If I remember correctly, we had thirteen Canadians, three Kenyans, two Vietnamese and one Chinese, most of them students. Jin (forestry student) and Xiaojin (studying China-Canada interrelations) left two years ago. The house stayed.
