Every year, EC Montreal celebrates Canada Day with our students. We decorate the student lounge with the Canadian flag and we serve typical Canada Day treats like hot dogs and potato chips! Students usually buy their own flag and get all their friends and classmates to sign it for them as a souvenir of their time in Canada. It doesn’t take long for our students to fall in love with Canada. Here they feel safe, they feel at peace and they feel happy! They are surrounded by kind and welcoming people and have the most breathtaking scenery to enjoy. Montreal, specifically, has such a nice mix of beautiful architecture and nature parks. At the center of our city is Mount-Royal. It is a mountain that is 737 feet high. When you are on Mount-Royal it is easy to forget that you are in a large city. You can walk up the different nature trails and really get lost in nature.
At our annual Canada Day celebrations, we also teach our students the national anthem. We play it on our large television screen in the student lounge with the lyrics displayed in both English and French. We also have Canadian postcards available for our students with the anthem lyrics displayed on them for our students to keep as a souvenir.
It warms our hearts to hear our students singing along to our anthem and it delights us to know that so many of our students wish to pursue their post-secondary education right here in Canada. Many of our students also have plans to immigrate to Canada and learning English and French at EC Montreal is the first step to their immigration process.
We also encourage our students to head over to the Old Port of Montreal where all the Canada Day festivities take place every year. There are musical performances, a giant Canada Day cake, fireworks, games and food to enjoy! My favourite thing to look forward to at the annual Canada Day party is the citizenship ceremony that takes place with the new immigrants. They are so happy to have been granted citizenship that they usually cry tears of joy and the audience joins them in this very touching ceremony.
This year, there were no such festivities taking place in the city, instead, there was an online concert with a wide range of performing artists to enjoy. We enjoyed this national holiday in our own way, in private, on a sunny summer day! We enjoyed a picnic with the family and treated ourselves to some Canadian treats like Bloody Caesars, which were invented here in Canada as well as hot dogs, hamburgers and another Canadian invention; ketchup chips!
We are proud to live in a beautiful and welcoming country like Canada and look forward to many more Canada Day celebrations with our students in the years to come! In the meantime, you can begin your Canadian language adventure with English or French online lessons with EC Virtual.
Happy Canada Day everyone!
