A Canadian comes to Bilbao to do a Spanish course

There are not many students that are from Canada that come to Bilbao but they are worth their weight in gold. They are very nice and the Canadian that came last October was a Canadian called Jack . He was tall and big, he almost did not make it through the door of Instituto Hemingway , but his friendly smile and his innate happiness started to form a part of the landscape of our Spanish school l. He brought us Canadian maple syrup that we liked a lot. The first day that he arrived we organised a trip to San Mamés football stadium. We explained the rules of football to him as Jack is a fan of ice hockey. He asked for Tom Hortons but we told him that they only thing that we have similar is Starbucks and it has been there since last year. We asked the Basque police what is the equivalent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and they said to us that Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world but in a few years Bilbao given the low birth rate will soon be something similar. We are also similar to Canada in the sense that they have English and French as their official languages and Bilbao has Spanish and Basque.

Bilbao´s climate has seemed tropical compared with the 30km tunnels that link different buildings in Montreal given the extreme cold.

The beaver is the Canada´s animal and he asked us in class what is the animal of here but we did not know how to respond. There are many we said but none of them are a symbol of the country. It is something cultural. The queen of England is the head of state of Canada and therefore there are many things that are related to Europe, they are not alien to him, unlike his American neighbours. Jack was with us for four weeks and he started with zero and he finished the A1 book and he went back to Canada and he could continue his studies with Instituto Cervantes . He said that he will come back next year with a B1 level Spanish and he will go to see a Basque ball game. See you soon Jack!