They feel they are travelling the world inside the city and the common question in mind might be “Where is a real Canadian?"
65 countries in the world have English as a first language, and almost 25% of international students in Canada study in Toronto. Either in the subway, in their homestay or walking on the street, many ESL students seem confused about what they thought was a Canadian citizen.
At first, learning English isn’t just an activity to learn another language, but a kind of soup in which the ingredients are accents, registers, dialects, cultures and backgrounds. The maple leaf is hidden inside of each star that fell onto Canadian soil. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “The stars are beautiful because of a flower that cannot be seen”. Toronto can amaze anyone who comes to experience Canadian culture and suddenly finds herself in a similar situation to the little prince visiting different planets.
The first experience students get when arriving in Toronto is at their homestay. They take off their shoes and enter a house in which there usually lives a Canadian with a background originating abroad. Poutine is usually eaten elsewhere, brunch is a western dish for some students and a fish from the Indian Ocean for others. The main point is how complex it is to describe the culture from the capital of Ontario. Research in 2011 says that, after English (an official language in Canada), the language with the second-highest number is Mandarin Chinese with 86,000 first-language speakers. Italian, Spanish, Tagalog, Tamil, Portuguese and Russian all come before the other official language (French, with 32,665).
Cultural experience does not default when the issue is studying in an ESL school, especially in Toronto. The way to school seems fast, even if a student lives in Kennedy or McCowan. Camila Cavalcante, an Advertising student from Brazil, said that it was a different and a weird kind of experience for her when she got on the subway for the first time and heard a confusion of languages. While, for Fernanda Serafin, the reason for her choosing Toronto was because it is a metropolitan city.
Chinatown, Little India, Koreatown, Greektown, Little Italy and all the international festivals in the summer impress tourists and shelter the cultures of those real Canadians with international backgrounds.
"The word is 'Aunt'", said a woman to a Mexican student on the subway while she was asking her friend, "How can I say, 'tia'?" I couldn't contain myself and asked the woman, "Are you from Brazil?" but she was from Portugal. Actually, her family is Portuguese. She is a "real Canadian".
