CANADA: A CULTURAL MOSAIC

In the last articles of this blog, we’ve been mainly talking about Korea and its adaptation to the new wave of foreigners within different institutions such as universities, transports, touristic infrastructures and restaurants. We will know jump to another area, Canada and North America, which was also part of our program. Amélie and I both experienced living in Canada which is a real melting pot of people from very different origin and however living all together. Therefore, I will explain in this article what is the particularity of Canada and its culture.

Canada is one of the most culturally diverse country in the world attributable to its history and its immigration policy. We observe in every big cities of the country a large variety of shops and restaurants from all over the world; communities of Indian, Chinese, Italian and others are settled pretty much everywhere and they are connected and united to each others.  The country has people from more than 200 countries of origin , and in 2010 the country received around 280,000 migrants from Philippines, India and China as a top 3 of country of origin (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2011).

Table 4: Permanent Residents Admitted in 2010, by Top 10 Source Countries (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2011)
Rank	Country	Number	Percentage
1	Philippines	36,578	13.0%
2	India	30,252	10.8%
3	People’s Republic of China	30,197	10.8%
4	United Kingdom	9,499	3.4%
5	United States of America	9,243	3.3%
6	France	6,934	2.5%
7	Iran	6,815	2.4%
8	United Arab Emirates	6,796	2.4%
9	Morocco	5,946	2.1%
10	Republic of Korea	5,539	2.0%
Total Top 10		147,799	52.7%
All Other Source Countries		132,882	47.3%
TOTAL		280,681	100.0%

 

Many of the migrants arriving in Canada are temporary residents such as foreign workers, as part of the Canada’s economic growth, international students, thanks to the diversity of the educational system and visitors for pleasure or business. As a result, a part of the foreign workers and international students will apply for the Canadian citizenship after living in the country for few years (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2011). For those reasons, the country is populated by people from very distinctive culture, however they succeed to live together in the same country known for its serenity.

The question that comes to mind then is how to define the Canadian culture if there are people from all over the world?  There is no real definition of the Canadian culture. It is a nation that believes in peace, order and good government. People are gentle, tolerant, helpful and trustful. Nevertheless, the rest of world tends to compare Canada and the USA as the same culture, but the big difference here is that Canada doesn’t need to adapt to its inhabitants, students or tourists because the population has a culture awareness that make people respect each other’s customs without dropping its own origin or culture. Canadians adapt the common community standards, which make the country so ethnically rich, whereas USA inhabitants encourage a form of nationalism and pride to be part of the American culture only: Unity VS Diversity that what differentiate those two similar but very different countries that are the USA and Canada (Beaver, 2013).

What we can remember from this exception, is that Canada’s people found the way to keep their own culture, values and origins but they still adapted to a common culture that respect each other and create a unique and rich ethnical heritage to one of the biggest country of the world and also one of the most tolerant country , Canada, the land of 200 languages.

Beaver, O. (2013, May 9). Seeing the similarities in Canada’s different cultures. Récupéré sur Inside Halton: http://www.insidehalton.com/opinion-story/3067777-seeing-the-similarities-in-canada-s-different-cultures/

Citizenship and Immigration Canada. (2011, 10 27). Récupéré sur Governlent of Canada: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/publications/annual-report-2011/section2.asp#part2_1

Ophélie Bourgeois

Transportation in Paris

The analysis of the city of Paris will begin with its public transports, as we previously studied Seoul subway and bus systems.

We’ll see below that the Parisian subway system is more adapted to foreign visitors than buses that are lacking of translations and we’ll try to compare this public transport network with Seoul’s.

                                                                                   

The website of Paris public transport: www.ratp.fr is entirely available in English and the section targeting tourists can be read in Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch and Japanese. This category gives information about how to buy a ticket, how to go to airports, or on tours… An application for smartphones is also available in those different languages and a paper guide summarizing this information is offered in French with English translation.

Another brochure, entitled “Metro & RER travel guide”, exists to guide step by step visitors in their use of the Parisian subway.

Multilingual vending machines selling tickets are present in most subway and RER stations.

For most used lines, within trains and on decks, prevention messages and security measures are announced in French, English, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese. A good thing would to homogenize this service to every subway lines and every transport mode: RER, bus, etc.

If we take a look at buses, the city still has some way to go, indeed the bus system offers very little, if none, translations. This probably comes from the fact that tourists barely use buses as the subway is considered to be the easiest and fastest way to move and go from one place to another inside the city, as it avoids traffic.

Fortunately, several bus tours exist for tourists that want to move within Paris from one touristy spot to another conveniently. Those bus tours are very popular because routes can be tailormade to individual requirements. Ticket can bought online, on a website available in French, English, Italian, Spanish and German.

Regarding taxis, the city of Paris supports the association “Paris Capitale Taxis” which goal is to improve the quality of the ride offering taxi drivers a training to learn English and have a better understanding of the job. This offer is, of course, optional and based on volunteering. It is taxi drivers’ choice to use that service.

Methods of payment are not homogenized between the different transportation modes, like it is in Seoul. Indeed, payment and buying a ticket must be really complicated for foreign visitors as the price and the ticket will depend on where you are going and which transport you’re planning to use. Paris and its suburb are divided into several geographical zones that define the price of the ticket, so if visitors are planning to go to less touristy places outside Paris center or airports, buying a subway ticket might become difficult for them. Moreover, once a ticket has been validated in the subway for example, it cannot be used again to take the bus, even right after, and vice versa.

All of this is very complicated to understand for someone that is not used to it and it is even harder for someone that does not speak the local language. (Of course, this information is only valid for people that do not live in Paris. Parisian people own a magnetic card that makes their movements and payment easier).

Maybe the city should make an effort on this matter and try to develop a more efficient and easiest system for temporary journeys.

Nevertheless, the tourism information office offers a large range of passes to facilitate visitors’ stay in Paris, such as the “Paris city passport” which can be tailored to tourists needs according to the length of their stay and what do they want to visit. This card gives its users access to public transportation (bus, tram, subway & RER) as well as touristy spots such as museums, bus tours, etc. The aim of this product is to save time and benefit from discounts.

Looking at foreign visitors’ opinions on travelling websites and forums, we can notice that most of them would prefer to take the bus because you can see more of the city and there are no stairs to climb but using public buses in Paris as a foreigner can be quite hard so most of them use the subway to go from one place to another.

Even though adjustments concerning languages have been made already, more translations efforts should be made in stops and within transports.

Like in Seoul, buses remain difficult for foreigner to use without any preparation; thanks to its translations, map and guides, the subway system is more user-friendly for foreign visitors. The homogeneous payment system for transportation in Seoul is a great advantage compared to the various tickets Paris transportation system offers. Because calculation of the price of the ride was automatic in Seoul, foreigners are not afraid to make a mistake when buying a ticket like they can be in Paris.

One of the top touristy city in the World: Paris, France

Now that we studied Seoul and went a little deeper in the subject of cultural adaptation, it’s time to move on to another global city, the capital of France: Paris.

Before going into details and for you to understand the importance of tourism for this city, we’ll start by giving you some information and numbers about the tourism industry in Paris.

Around the World, Paris is seen as a romantic city

Paris is a highly touristy city. It welcomes around 18 million foreign visitors per year. Among that number, more than 68% of it are English, American, Italian, Spanish, German or Japanese (Mairie de Paris, 2010). British (13.2%), American (11.7%), and Spanish (9.9%) are the first three international clientele of the destination (Do you speak touriste ?, 2013).

The welcome of foreign tourists is considered as a major priority for the city of Paris. A 7 million Euros grant is yearly given to the Paris Tourist Office. Its website is available in 11 different languages, European languages: French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, all the languages spoken in the neighboring countries, and Asian languages: Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. This shows the willingness of the city to adapt to its foreign visitors and to inform them the best possible way.

Tourism is the economic backbone of the capital. It generates 300 000 jobs, directly and indirectly. On average, foreign tourists’ expenses in Paris generate around 10 billion euros per year.

Paris is a highly coveted destination for business trips, meetings and events. In 2009, it was the world leading destination for conventions (tied with Vienna) and is still the leader for fairs and exhibitions. 40% of foreign visitors go to Paris for business reasons (Mairie de Paris, 2010).

According to the ranking made by Mastercard of the most visited cities in the World, Paris is ranked 3^rd after Bangkok and London (Dufour, A., 2013).

Now that you know a little bit about tourism in Paris and its economic importance for the city, will try to analyze, in following articles, what adjustments the city is carrying out to adapt to foreigners.

As an introduction, we can first mention the project launched recently (June 2013) by the Regional Tourism Committee and Chamber of Commerce of Paris, called “Do you speak touriste ?” (Do you speak touriste ?, 2013).

The objective of this project is to improve the quality of the hospitality and welcome of business owners towards foreign visitors. Indeed, the quality of reception is a key factor of competitiveness for a highly touristy city and Paris reputation abroad, in terms of hospitality, is unsatisfactory. In comparison with others major touristy cities like London, business owners in Paris have a poor mastery of foreign languages, insufficient knowledge about manners and tourists’ expectancies… (Do you speak touriste ?, 2013). This initiative seems to be discerning to me as, going back to the recent questionnaire that we conducted among foreign students (see previous article), we noticed that negative comments about the city of Paris were about the behavior of French people and business owners.

Professionals need to be prepared to meet, at the best, foreign customers’ needs. That is why, for this project, a guide and a website have been created to help Parisian business owners improve their knowledge about foreign visitors and make them learn basics of some foreign languages (Do you speak touriste ?, 2013).

Those tools contain information about:
- Foreigners’ expenses, length of their stay, manners and their expectations according to their nationality;
- The most visited spots in Paris, actuality about local events, leisure and culture;
- Important numbers relative to tourism in the Parisian region and basic notions of foreign languages so that professionals can communicate better with their customers.

Do you speak touriste ? 2013, June. 

The city of Paris seems to have identified a strong issue it has regarding the welcome of foreigner visitors and it is trying to fix it, creating and launching projects like the one described in this article. On following articles, I’ll identify other events or project the city is carrying out to adjust to foreigners. I’ll also write articles about transportation and other facilities composing a global city like we previously did with Seoul.

References

Mairie de Paris. 2010, September 30^th. Le tourisme.

Retrieved from: http://www.paris.fr/politiques/les-politiques-parisiennes/le-tourisme/rub_9706_stand_82756_port_24008

Dufour, A., BFM TV. 2013, June. Paris, troisième destination touristique au monde.

Retrieved from: http://www.bfmtv.com/economie/paris-troisieme-destination-touristique-monde-538834.html

L’espace professionnel à la destination Paris, Ile-de-France. 2013, June. Do you speak touriste ?

Retrieved from: http://www.tourismepro-paris-idf.com/do-you-speak-touriste/

Do you speak touriste ? 2013. La clientèle internationale.

Retrieved from: http://www.doyouspeaktouriste.fr/tourisme_idf.php

Foreigner's perception of global cities

Along this blog, we already studied how the city of Seoul is accessible to foreigners and we are planning to do the same thing with Canada and the city of Paris.

To go further into the topic of this blog we thought that collecting the impressions and opinions of tourists, expatriates, etc. might add value to the analyses carried out. That is why, we created questionnaires that has been sent to classmates that lived for a short time (around 3 months) in those cities/countries. The respondents of these questionnaires are French, Canadian, Chinese and Korean.

The goal of this survey is to give us an insight about the way some foreigners “felt” living in those cities and their perception about the efforts Seoul, Paris and Canada are making to adapt to them.

Of course, because adaptation to a country/culture is different depending on the culture of origin, we will try to analyze the different answers according to the nationalities of the respondents. For example, it seems normal that westerners will have less trouble adjusting to a western country different from theirs than an Asian person.

A caricature of the World seen by Americans. 2012, February 12^th. Retrieved from: My wonderful life. http://alison-staples.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-do-you-see-world.html

To see the different questionnaires, click on the links below:

 - Questionnaire about the city of Seoul: http://fr.surveymonkey.com/s/QS5K8CB

 - Questionnaire about the city of Paris: http://fr.surveymonkey.com/s/Q68NZQ6

 - Questionnaire about Canada: http://fr.surveymonkey.com/s/QZDQBDW

The results

You’ll find below a general overview of the results obtained to this survey. Detailed results will come later on, in following articles.

I decided to split the results into three categories: the answers obtained regarding the place itself and its facilities; the answers got about the local culture and the comparison between the three destinations.

If you have any comment to make, share your opinion or experiences, etc. please feel free to leave a comment on this article or the previous ones.

The city/country and its facilities

The survey was containing several questions about the places themselves and their facilities. One of the questions asked about the troubles experienced by the respondent while doing daily life activities (eating, shopping, visiting, moving).

The activities where most of the respondents encountered trouble while living in those three different places were eating in restaurant and going grocery shopping while very few had to face difficulties using public transportation or visiting touristic spots.

These answers could demonstrate that, because of a high level of tourism in those destinations, public transportation and touristic spots are arranged for foreigners, which would be why almost no trouble was faced for these two activities.

The local culture

As we’ve seen in previous articles, it exists several ways to adapt to a foreign culture such as: assimilation and integration (see the article posted on July, 22^nd, “How state policies can influence on the attractiveness of their country abroad?”). To identify which acculturation process the respondents went through, a question in the survey asked which cultural habits they adopted or kept between their birth ones and local ones.

In those three situations, both westerners and easterners kept their cultural habits and adopt some of the local culture. This behavior can, of course, being explained by the fact that respondents only stayed in those places for a short period so they did not want to put aside their own culture. But it has been noticed that none of the respondents kept their cultural habits without adopting some of the local ones which shows the interest, that people living abroad have, in discovering new cultures.

Before going through the acculturation process individuals staying in an unknown country experience a culture shock. This term “culture shock” was first introduced by the anthropologist Kalvero Oberg in 1954. You’ll find below his definition of a culture shock:

“Culture shock is precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse. These signs or cues include the thousand and one ways in which we orient ourselves to the situations of daily life: when to shake hands, […], how to make purchases, when to accept and when to refuse invitations, when to take statements seriously and when not. Now these cues which may be words, gestures, facial expressions, customs, or norms are acquired by all of us in the course of growing up and are as much a part of our culture as the language we speak or the beliefs we accept. All of us depend for our peace of mind and our efficiency on hundreds of these cues, most of which we do not carry on the level of conscious awareness.”

According to the different answers obtained for this question, we saw that culture shocks have been experienced in France and South Korea, by both westerners and easterners whereas only easterners faced a culture shock in Canada. The common reply regarding the reasons for these culture shocks is language barrier. Indeed, as we saw in previous articles, language is very important has it is the main element of communication. Not speaking the local language makes adaptation harder and slower as the access to the host culture become difficult. These responses reinforce what we said in previous articles about the importance of translations in public places, menus in restaurants, different panels and signs, etc. The multiple translations (to English, Mandarin and Japanese) in Seoul are really appreciated by foreigners. It makes them feel welcome and it prevent them from feeling lost.

Comparison

In order to compare the three destinations, the respondents were asked to grade those places according to the accessibility of the local culture and adaptability to the local life. The degree of simplicity to live as a foreigner in those three destinations has also been asked.

The answers to this part will be given in the future, once articles about the city of Paris and Canada will be published. So watch out this blog if you want to know more about it!

Conclusion

These questionnaires demonstrated, once again, that the first step in adjusting to foreign cultures is to offer various translations of key information. This show how much language is important to integrate or be integrated within a culture.

Culture shocks are experienced by every single individuals living in a foreign country but the intensity of this shock changes from one person to another depending on its birth culture, its host culture, its adaptability to unknown situations, etc. Adjustments carried out by cities and countries to make information, facilities and the local culture accessible to foreigners also play a major role in the intensity of the culture shock experienced.

The answers given to this survey also confirm the fact that is it easier for Westerners to adapt to Western culture than for Easterners and vice versa.