I’m a lady and Canadian. I’m not from the part of Canada where it’s -20 during the day in winter, I’m from the part where it snows, then thaws, then snows again. As a teenager, I did wear pants to school in winter, and a jacket. But the jacket was unzipped, and I refused to wear any other outerwear, or socks. Many…

These were my absolute favourite shoes at the end of high school and beginning of college. I wore mine long after they were presentable because they were so comfortable and looked so good with so much. I cried when I had to throw mine away and couldn’t find a good replacement, and have periodically haunted Asos and…

Hear, hear! If you must have a fondant cake for the ‘grams, at least have another, good cake for eating.

In first grade, a girl in my class told me she was a ninja, and if I told anyone she would kill me. I didn’t know what a ninja was, but I was terrified of her for years after that.

This same girl had a brother about 4 years older than us. She once told me about his ‘little black book,’ where he rated all of her…

I’m a college lecturer, and unlike school teachers, we don’t have substitutes we can call if we’re sick. Also, if it was an important class, say a test day, management makes us redo it, usually while we’re supposed to be recovering. As a result, it is almost never worth it to call in sick, it’s better to take…

At work last year. I’m a college lecturer and I had exams to grade, a 40-hour workweek crammed into 4 days because of a professional development day, which was supposed to go from 8:30 until 6, and a paper due for a course I was taking. Not helping is that my manger’s usual response to situations like these is, ‘A…

You can’t even get aspirin or ibuprofen without a prescription. My sister developed a yeast infection while visiting me, and despite paying hundreds of dollars at the foreigners’ hospital in Tokyo, they wouldn’t give her whatever the standard drug is in North America.

Oh, god. I remember the very first week I was there, another new arrival had had a car accident and she was asking everybody if they knew where to get pot because she ‘couldn’t deal with the stress.’ People were trying to tell her to stop being an idiot, but she didn’t want to hear it.

I lived in the north, where…

My SO is an academic with a very generic name, and would have actually liked to change ours into a cool hybrid that stands out more, but we live in a country where you can’t change your name unless it’s embarrassing, so we’ve just kept our own names.

I never understood the cultural imperative to have a period and always found it messy and uncomfortable. I got my period just before I turned 12 and I didn’t want to figure out tampons right away. That worked fine for about a month, until I wanted to go swimming while I had it, and realised I’d have to keep my legs…

I was in Copenhagen a few weeks ago, and good luck finding a non-Asian restaurant outside the city centre! We decided to see something in an inner suburb and walk back, which took about 2 hours. Even though we were on big roads, the only places serving food were Thai and Vietnamese takeaways until we got near Tivoli.…

I will see your rudest stag and doe party and raise you an invitation to one where everything else was the same, but we were also supposed to bring a dish of food. This was from someone who had won $1 million in the lottery the year before.

I was offended when a friend who can’t boil water wanted $30 muffin tins that I guarantee are still in a box in her basement, even though she got married in 2006, but your MIL’s friend wins.

Exactly! I’m from southern Ontario where unfortunately these are a thing. It used to be you either had a bridal shower OR a stag and doe, but now most people have several bridal showers (work, mother-in-law, one of your maternal aunts) AND a stag and doe with the exact same people. Some now even have additional…

I served drinks at a course where the members had voted to pay the food and beverage staff a ‘premium’ wage ($1.50 above minimum) rather than have a gratuity added to their bills. A gratuity was still optional, but you don’t afford your $10,000+ membership fees by tipping college students trying to earn next year’s…

I know my first cousins on my mother’s side, but her mother was 12 of 13 kids. She had something like 60 first cousins just on that side of her family, some of whom were older than her mother! And who knows how many second, third and fourth cousins she now has scattered throughout North America. I haven’t been to a…

My grandmother never told anyone who my grandfather is. I’m not even sure my dad knows because he refuses to talk about it. I assume whoever he was, he’s dead now, but literally anyone born between the 1940s and say, the 1990s could be my half-sibling and there’s no way to know without DNA testing.

The first part literally happened to me. I was in the middle seat of a row of 3 and this Muslim guy who was dressed in his white robes on his way to the Hajj comes up and asks me to switch seats with my boyfriend. I was ready to fight, but my boyfriend made me switch on the grounds that the guy was on his way to the…

I've been with my husband for 10 years and knew my in-laws for seven years. We only saw them once or twice a year because they live in another country, but everything seemed perfectly pleasant until 2 years ago. I unintentionally insulted my brother-in-law, which led to the sudden revelation that the entire family…

I've heard this exact story from every person who ever tried to enter Canada solo, including me. I'm Canadian, and lived in Japan for a few years. When I came back to live, I put my parents' address on my entry card, as that was where I would be residing as soon as I was allowed out of the airport. The border agent…