Sky feels lower, people are introverted — We asked immigrants what surprised them in Canada

The experience of having packed up and moved across the world is a common one in Canada. Almost a quarter of our population are immigrants. 

At a recent CBC Calgary town hall focused on the challenge of settling in Canada, we asked participants about that experience.  

We asked: What was the most challenging part of moving to Canada, and what struck them as the most strange or funny as they adjusted? 

Here are a few of their answers. 

Tala Abuhayyaneh was 17 when she came from Jordan with her parents in 2015. 

"The most challenging thing was being the oldest child to immigrant parents. There's a lot of things that older children do to help their parents, especially if they're more fluent in English.

"Like, there's a lot of forms that people have to fill out. There's very little to no guidance on how to fill out these forms. That confuses a lot of people. A lot of people come from countries where systems like that do not exist. It was a big adjustment, for sure."

And what struck her as strange as she adjusted? For Abuhayyaneh, it was that people didn't know the meaning of their names.

"I would ask people like what does your name mean? Because I want to share what my name means with people and I would often get: Well, I don't know what my name means.

"People would just have this 'dilemma face' on them. So that was something that I found really funny. But it always sparked a good conversation."

"My name means small palm tree in Arabic."

Michael Embaie came from Eritrea through Sudan and landed at the airport in November 1983. The snow was melting, which surprised him because it looked so dirty.

But the strangest thing came a week later, when the sun was shining through his window. He put on shorts and was in for a brutal surprise. 

"It was like, –20 again. I came out in my shorts because I couldn't understand how it could be sunny and that cold. So I stepped from my building, and two steps and I was freezing.