Lately, I’m living in Vancouver. I used to visit Toronto over the summers, and so I’m familiar with that unique disappointment of an American traveling abroad to Canada. You have to search so hard to find any difference that the ones you do find — the two-dollar coins! the superfluous u’s! the healthcare! — become the focal point of your anecdotes, making Canada seem like a very mild-mannered place indeed. People say “sore-y” and “eh” and something that falls shy of both our Yankee “uh-bowt” and the exaggerated “a-BOOT” that will always and forever honk forth from the mouths of cartoon Canadians. There is French included on all shampoo bottles, cereal boxes, and hand-washing stickers. Clerks and cashiers are slightly friendlier, while people on the street are slightly more aloof. BMIs are, on average, 5-10 points lower. In a word: Canada!

Vancouver, specifically, is a strange place. Whenever I tell people I’m living there, they almost inevitably go, “Oh, it’s beautiful.” This is probably because Vancouver is beautiful. During the first few weeks of January I was unimpressed by the constant gray wash of rain and the 99 bus route that took me to the underwhelming, industrial UBC campus. But now that it’s May I’ve been forced to admit that Vancouver is, in fact, the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. The ethereal fir trees, the Technicolor flowers as big as my head, skies that (when it stops raining) over-compensate by turning hot pink, Robin’s egg, velvety indigo, and perfect backlit aqua-blue, the snow-capped mountains that look as if they were painted there, the glittering ocean-liners gliding past beneath them, the willowy glass high-rise apartments. Where I live, at least, Vancouver gives off the impression of expensive, floral cleanliness. My neighborhood is populated by wealthy retirees who walk little bouquets of designer puppies, or else slender young mothers in black yoga pants who push strollers as large as Mini Coopers. When I’m at my most homesick, I think of the humble little U.S. cities I come from — Little Rock, St. Louis — and am overwhelmed with nostalgia for humidity, seediness, old buildings, a faint tinge of dirtiness and languidness.

Vancouver, as it turns out, does have its seedy areas, but the city is divided as crisply and unapologetically as a social satire. You get off at one bus stop and you’ll be catcalled, grabbed, begged for change: you get off at the next and flawless 21-year-olds with highlighted hair will move past you, imperious and unseeing, on their private angelic trajectories to success. For the most part, Vancouver, like all of Canada, is comparatively very safe. I habitually walk around alone at night and never feel threatened. Strange and violent things do happen here, but they’re random enough to seem like something from a fairy-tale — the son of a Russian television star commits suicide next to the sea-wall, or disembodied feet in running shoes wash ashore one by one, alone and mismatched. It’s as if some power-that-be is trying to invent a gritty side for Vancouver and failing, only managing to deepen the folkloric detachment of the place.
But of course this is just me — naive, a transitory visitor, seldom venturing much further than the Shopper’s Mart on West 10th. And as with most beautiful things, I can’t control my compulsive desire to pathologize Vancouver, to create back-stories and mysteries and myths. Plain towns and cities just smack of dusty, clunky reality — but a beautiful city begs for something darker beneath the surface, something wormy beneath the rose-bed. Or, at the very least, something scandalous like nicotine secretly laced into Tim Horton’s coffee, the only reason anyone would ever frequent that place ever again.

This time, I arrived at what will probably be listed in history books as a small but significant turning point in national identity. Vancouver hosted the Winter Olympics, just a month after I arrived with my lavender luggage set. To the amazement of all the editorial columns, Canada refused to play the modest housewife offering up Ritz-cracker canapés and demurring, “Oh, no, you play, I’ll just watch.” Instead they gritted their teeth, flexed their muscles, and walked away with enough gold medals to pad Scrooge McDuck’s vault for a spectacular swan-dive. This included an ultimate hockey match that turned the whole city into a ghost town — when I visited my local Safeway I found it nearly abandoned, just me and a few shuffling geriatrics. Cyndi Lauper had been replaced with live coverage of the game, and my cashier wore maple-leaf head-boppers and smiled with the deranged eyes of a cult member. I walked home down empty streets, bicycles dropped carelessly on sidewalks, garden hoses writhing unattended, past open windows that buzzed and murmured with suspense. When Canada won, the pot-lid-banging and car-horn-blowing easily (easily!) exceeded the celebration I’d heard on election night in 2008.

For the next two months after the win, it was difficult for me to forget that I was not in Kansas anymore (or Alabama, Arkansas, et al). The city exploded with the color red, a jolly bloodbath of patriotism. Lingerie mannequins, convenience store windows, minivan antennas, Tim Horton donuts, every storefront and apartment window ever — all of them, spangled with triumphant red and gold. Maple leafs, usually reserved for punch-lines or syrup bottles, became a symbol of unparalleled underdog glory. Canadians everywhere woke up feeling at least 25% better about themselves as individuals. I’ve never felt so conscious of my status as an American. Luckily for me, my naturally ginger hair, unfashionable red winter coat, and penchant for Revlon red fingernails kept me safe. I think people smiled at me more during those few months, and taxi drivers got me to the airport with time to spare. But all the while my heart stayed stubbornly true to the good old US of A: to our half-imaginary obesity epidemic, our hypocritical finger-wagging, our self-made Cinderella mythology that has warped and hardened, our superior donuts and inferior beer, our polarizing letters to the editor, our million and one irresistible guilty pleasures.