The Northern Report

Hey TWC,

We are nearing the halfway mark of the internship. Hard to believe, eh?

America: also spelled “Ammericuh” or “-Mericuh”

Last week, I posted about how I was starting to get the feel for Washington and the United States. Of course, my experience is, while unstructured and based on my own initiative, very limited, and I do recognize that. However, it has been an incredible learning experience for me so far.

Americans aren’t type-A personalities; type-A personalities are Americans. While this can be very overwhelming for me at times, the strength of character of the American people, whether good or bad, has consistently impressed me. This has been both a difficult and enlightening experience.

Regardless, some Americanisms have rubbed off on me. As part of a project at my internship placement, I made a phone call to a Canadian government department and spoke with several civil servants. Speaking to Ottawans (i.e. people from Ottawa, my hometown), it was a big shock to hear a Canadian accent on the other end of the phone. Being able to discern the Canadian accent suggests I might have been out of the country a little too long. Some other Americanisms I’ve picked up are saying “y’all” occasionally, which is probably a by-product of living in Virginia, part of the Southern United States as well as interacting with some Southerners. My roommate is from North Carolina, and he’s probably to blame more than anything. A specific terminological shift was my unwitting usage of “college” and “university” interchangeably, something Canadians don’t do because colleges and universities are distinct types of institutions in Canada.

I have done my best to stay in touch with my Canadian roots, ensuring to inject the interrogative “eh?” into every sentence no less than three times. Whenever I feel truly disheartened with my predicament of being surrounded by Americans, I go onto YouTube and watch Sidney Crosby score the Golden Goal at the 2010 Winter Olympics. A Canadian flag is now prominently hung in our living room across from my roommate’s Boston Celtics flag, although I get the feeling that after the NBA finals my flag lifts spirits far more than his does.

Fortunately, I’ve largely avoided notoriously unhealthy Southern cuisine and soul food. It’s almost exclusively pork, which I don’t eat, but is always deep fried. I’ll leave out the details, but if you’re interested go look up things like chitlins, fatback, pig’s knuckles, and ham hock. Fried chicken and chicken-fried steak remains delicious, though, as does the Americans’ impeccable skill to barbecue anything to delicious perfection. In the American’s defence (spelled with a ‘c’), an infamous French-Canadian dish known as poutine (chips with cheese curd and beef gravy) that perhaps rivals soul food in its unhealthiness will be making an appearance at our Canada Day party this weekend. Many thanks to the state of Wisconsin for producing cheese curd in bulk and shipping it overnight to Virginia.

The Chinatown gate in DC, which I may or may not have added to break up the long section of text in a colourful and distracting way.

Football in America, but not American football

Football (ok, soccer. Happy?) is a burgeoning sport in North America (ok, Canada and the United States) and Major League Soccer is becoming more popular. I really enjoy soccer, and I’m happy that the World Cup is making Americans more interested in it. Major American companies are seeing the commercial value in soccer as well. Budweiser being the official beer of the World Cup is a massive sign of what’s to come for America’s involvement in the sport (especially considering the European beer culture and tradition).

The District and some of the interns have been fairly caught up in soccer. Saturday and Sunday afternoons have been dominated by the game in my apartment, and the city is no different. Many bars in DC and Virginia have been open for 7am matches, and the USA games were publicly screened at Dupont Circle. Even though the United States has been defeated by this point, people are still watching.

Aside from FIFA, Washington has its own MLS team, DC United, which is considered to be among the best in the league. DC United played the El Salvador national men’s team last Saturday, ending in a 1-0 win for United. Alexandria has an extremely large El Salvadorian population for some reason, and as a result, the crowd was largely rooting for them. When it became clear that El Salvador was not going to win, a few scuffles in the crowd broke out between El Salvadorian fans and a few ran out onto the field thus proving the official pastimes of Latin America are futbol and irrational emotion.

DC United will be playing Seattle Sounders FC next month with discounted ($15) tickets for college students, so I hope to see all interns out and cheering for United. Landon Donovan, team USA’s star player and a man commonly considered to be the best American soccer player of all time, will be making an appearance with LA Galaxy the week after.