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I am Canadian

I took the oath of citizenship along with 120 other people this morning. We were from 24 different countries.

After two hours of administration and waiting a citizenship officer entered the room. She told us that a member of the police will enter the room soon and we will be asked to rise to honour the citizenship judge. Well, the member of police was about 5' tall - a young woman from the auxiliary department. It was her time off supposedly, and she volunteered to greet us on this special day. But she kept looking at her watch so I guess she regretted the volunteering after the first half hour. The judge was probably french with a heavy accent but he spoke nicely and made us really welcome in our new country. He was looking at his watch too. Well, it's probably not the highlight of his career to conduct a citizenship ceremony but he's getting paid big bucks for it so it's all good i guess.

We took the oath in French (had some trouble repeating his words) and in English, then received the citizenship card & certificate, signed some papers and listened to the judge. He talked about how peaceful Canada is and how everything is nice and dandy here. Well...i could name a few imperfections but I could name a lot more anywhere else so when he said that Canada is the best country in the world, i think i believed him. He said to us that we can finally proudly say the simple 4 word sentence "I am a Canadian" and made us repeat it like 4 times as it was a rock concert where the band is not happy with the volume of the crowd :) Everybody said "I am Canadian" though, without the "a". This is what watching too much Molson commercials do to you. Just for the record, I was wearing an "I am Canadian" tank top under my shirt. By accident. I was cold in the morning.

On the way home I felt a strange but good feeling (i guess it's the "being a Canadian" feeling). I felt that I was driving in my country. (the traffic jam is the same as it was before). And from now on when I see a newspaper headline "2 Canadian soldiers killed" I will feel that they were two of us not just 2 random people from Canada.

I am proud to be Canadian but I will always remain Hungarian at heart. A Hungarian Canadian not a Canadian Hungarian.

Post-A-Thought

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