Over the Remembrance Day long weekend, I hosted a friend from the U.S. who came up to Vancouver. It was the first time I’d entertained (A) an American (who is not presently dating a Canadian resident) in Canada or (B) a former law school classmate since the bar. Or rather, because I’d been in Vancouver only three whole days before my visitor arrived, the only “entertainment” I could provide involved getting us lost and in the parking lots of Canada’s oldest shopping mall.

With this visiting foil from the States, it was easy for me to remember—even only 40 kilometres from the border—that Canada is not the USA. You couldn’t, for starters, effortlessly find a place just a couple hours south in Seattle that will let you sit down to five screens of hockey and a huge plate of poutine. In fact, you could probably cross the border and spend whole days and weeks without thinking of hockey. Here, even a retreat into the heart of Gay Vancouver will lead you straight back to hockey night. But here, you can be gay, eat poutine, watch hockey, and get married. So I guess Canada is kind of like Massachusetts.

Likewise, my visitor helped me remember—even only six months out of law school—how my Fulbright is nothing like the work my peers are doing. Many of them spend the bulk of each day reading, writing, talking to judges, and often clarifying things with bosses. I spend the bulk of each day reading; writing; talking to judges, community workers, staff and volunteer lawyers, and nonprofit managers; telephoning people endlessly; watching schoolchildren figure out the court system; biking through the downtown streets of major North American cities; striking up conversations about community legal education with people in the poorest neighborhood in Canada; hunting down a connection that can get me a VIP tour of a community policing centre; leisurely and carefully reading books about critical lawyering, urban land use, and the jurisprudence of poverty law all at the same time; and not having a boss at all.

It’s amazing how far you can go without hardly leaving.