Nearly two months on the road now and I'm getting a bit tired of other people's ideas of tidy.
I’m gong to Halifax next week to look for somewhere to live. It’s a really nice city – it has a really busy port, so it’s very nautical. It’s built on the side of a hill, so everything slopes down to the water. It has four universities and a big gay population, (Rosie O’Donnell and Cindi Lauper arrived last week on a cruise ship with loads of gay couples that got married one after another during a single day) so it’s a very right on, organic restaurants, fair trade cafes, alternative music stores, second hand bookshops type of place. Perfect. It’s about the same size as Galway. Actually, it’s a mirror image of Galway, if Galway was built on the side of a hill.
I have a job. I’m going to be working for the ***. I’m to be a researcher for them – mainy on education, environment, immigration, a few other things. I saw the job advertised in the paper and submitted a CV, more out of curiosity than anything else. Then they offered me the job on the spot. I was so surprised I took it. Then I had to talk myself into it.
Before you shout complete sell out, Queenie, I told you so, I have to tell you I'm conflicted.
On the plus side, it’s a job, it’s a good job with an excellent salary for Nova Scotia, although it is woegeous compared to my last one. It’s something I can do, I know I can do. It may help to make a difference, if what people tell me about them is true. I get a nice office high up in a building in downtown Halifax, which I reckon is a pretty good spot to watch the winter from.
Most of all, it's an opportunity to live in Nova Scotia on more than the minimum wage.
I’ve been in the Maritimes, or Atlantic Canada as they call it, for about a month now. I absolutely love it. It’s like Ireland was in the eighties, except with better weather. The roads are terrible, nobody has any money, there aren’t any good jobs around, they all moan about the government all the time. Everyone’s convinced that there’s dodgy stuff going on, with big companies buying up all kinds of resources dead cheap. The ass is falling out of the fishing industry and farming. The only difference is that the place is full of call centres. So they must have fast-forwarded to that bit of the economic cycle.
Souns great you say. The thing is, it’s all at a much slower pace than at home. Cell phones are for emergencies. Nine to five is what it says on the tin. There’s time to stand and talk in the street if you meet someone. Nice. There's a focus on organic food, on recycling, on community-building, on having time for people that we have lost in Dublin. I want to live here for a while. This job is an opportunity to do that.
On the minus side, it’s the same work as I’ve done in the past, and this year is about doing things differently. So I’m a bit annoyed with myself for taking the first job I've been offered. I have a feeling I should be trying something different. But I wasn’t coming down with job offers from anywhere else and I am not wwoofing in the winter. My friend Ray said I should look at it in terms of changing one or two variables at a time in my life, think of it as part of that experiment – i.e. same job, different people, place, context.
We’ll see. It will be an interesting experience for the six months of my probation anyway and then we’ll see what happens. They asked me to stay for a good while. But they don’t know when that will be.
Another plus was the vibe I got from them and about them. My interview was delightfully informal and they seemed to be on my wavelength. And anyone I have talked to seems to think they're a good, well-meaning group of people. Apart from hunting enthusiasts. I hitched a lift from a guy the other day who told me he had twenty two guns!! He didn’t like the ***. Having said that, he also thought Hitler had a point. He asked me how I was going to use my Irish experience to get Canadians to vote for them and I said “What about 'Vote *** or I’ll kneecap you'” and he nearly crashed the car he laughed so much.
Actually, on a tangent, one weird thing I find is that most Canadians think the Troubles are still going on and always mention it in a really sympathetic manner. Then they’re almost annoyed when I tell them it’s all over bar the shouting. And the odd bank job. Overall though, they know quite a lot about the outside world compared to their neighbours. Very few of them have travelled abroad though. It seems to be that if they make it across Canada (and a lot have) then that’s enough. Having said that, they are wonderfully open and welcoming and interested in other cultures. A bit nosy, to tell the truth, a bit like the traditional Irish B&B woman. I haven’t been alone for one second since I got here, never mind lonely.
They have a really dry wit and mostly get the Irish sense of the absurd, although not always. They are also very polite, and nobody swears. They don’t drink very much during the week – they talk about community-building a lot here and do that sort of thing on week nights. They like to go out at the weekend though.
They never stop talking though, jeez, I thought I was bad. Also, I find Nova Scotians don’t like spending money and complain about the price of everything all the time. As everything is around half the price it is in Ireland, I find this hilarious. I don’t know yet whether that’s because they don’t have much money, or whether the stereotype followed them to the new world. I think it’s a bit of both!!!
On a final note:
Today’s learning is all about relativity. On my relatively woegeous salary, I could afford a 2,500 sq foot house on two acres of Atlantic seafront, in a nice community thirty miles from Halifax. Which doesn’t have traffic problems, not really, so the commute would be a doddle.
Read it and weep boys and girls….we are being ripped off by somebody somewhere in that value chain we keep being beaten up with the Yankee stick.
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