Photo by James Wheeler, Flick

It was a cold December night in 2011 and my fiancé and I were aboard a Christmas Carol cruise that had left Coal Harbour just minutes before. Our boat slid along English Bay with the twinkling lights of downtown Vancouver in the background. We hadn’t really paid attention to the carol part of the tour name when we booked it and didn’t think much of it other than that the cruise must have a Christmas theme. Had it not been for the lyrics that were handed out a bit later, we would have made fools out of ourselves: being from the Netherlands, we didn’t know most of the songs that we were supposed to sing.

We had arrived in Vancouver 16 months prior to that moment, and apart from some initial shocks – that you have to pay for incoming phone calls and that turning left at a Vancouver intersection is often a near-death experience – the transition had been pretty smooth. We felt welcome and settled into our workplaces and daily lives quite easily. Anything we didn’t know we found out soon enough, absorbing local knowledge like sponges.

On the surface, I look and act like a Vancouverite: I do yoga and have a vegetable garden. I have learned a lot in my two-and-a-half years here. Even though I cannot vote, I know who the mayor is. I even know why Vancouver doesn’t have any freeways within its city limits: residents protested in the 1960s against plans to demolish Gastown and build a freeway right through Strathcona.

I can name quite a few Canucks players. And like most Vancouverites, I am interested in history – not the dates-of-major-battles-type we learn back home, but the everyday life of average people. Although I was and still am surprised that Vancouverites call buildings that are 70 years old ‘historic’, I share their interest in how this city developed from a sleepy sawmill town into the multicultural place it is today, and I keep wanting to learn more about it. I even know some facts that many Vancouverites are not aware of: for example, that George Vancouver had Dutch ancestors whose family name was Van Coevorden.

But there’s only so much knowledge one can absorb by completing a degree and speaking English to neighbours. I am still missing the simple things you learn by having grown up here. I don’t know any children’s songs, Christmas songs or the tunes of TV shows that my Canadian-born peers grew up with in the 1980s. I just go blank in situations where these things come up, like parties and other social events.

I once read somewhere – I believe it was in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement – that at the beginning of WWII, when England was anticipating a German invasion, London residents were instructed to ask anyone who they suspected of being a German spy to sing a children’s song. The idea was that despite their accent-free English skills, spies wouldn’t know any songs and give themselves away. I sometimes feel like one of those spies.

I am sure there are many things I don’t know about the Netherlands, but I do know the children’s songs. Never did I have so much fun singing as I had at another group event that happened to involve a boat. In 2011, I went back to the Netherlands to attend my friends’ wedding. When the newlyweds literally embarked on matrimony on their sailing boat, all the guests stood at the dock singing a song we had all known since we were about three years old. I felt a sense of belonging. And I felt sorry for the best man, who was Polish.

I continue to learn and now that I know that a real Canadian sings about a porcupine in a pine tree, I feel like I’m finally catching up.