And yet I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my long, abiding love for the World Juniors hockey tournament. It’s an annual international tournament that happens over Christmas and New Year’s among the best players under the age of 21. 10 countries vie for the gold medal, though these days there are really only four likely winners–Canada, United States, Russia and Sweden. There are also three middling teams–Finland, Czech Republic and Slovakia, and three whipping boys–Denmark, Switzerland and Latvia.

Each tournament features some of the most inspired and fierce hockey you’ll ever see. These young players are the best in the world, and they’re competing for national pride and future NHL salaries. There are no fights, few cheap shots or half-assed back checks. The gold medal game is usually the best game of hockey I watch each year.

As a lifelong hockey fan, the tournament is also a chance to watch future stars before they make the NHL. Most Canadian players will have some kind of NHL career. Though the very best players like Sidney Crosby or Jonathan Toews will only play in the tournament as a 17-year-old. By the time they’re 18, they’re ensconced in the NHL, and their teams aren’t willing to loan them to the national team for the tournament.

I’ve watched the World Juniors live twice. We lived in Ireland in 2002, so we made a trip to the frosty Czech Republic to watch Team Canada play. That’s me standing outside an arena in Kladno. In 2006, I saw an unstoppable Canadian team beat up on some listless Russians, winning the gold medal in front of 18,630 very loud hometown fans at GM Place.

This year, our boys have skated out to a 8-1 thumping of the Finns on Boxing Day. Tougher tests await, most notably in the form of an excellent American program that’s been in ascendance for the past few years. I’ll be worshiping in front of the LCD god of television in the coming days, gorging on a host of World Juniors and Canucks games.

Do you watch the World Juniors?

One such event was at the Canadian ambassador’s residence, in a very posh Dublin suburb (the Canadian government has since sold it, but I see that you can rent it for a mere €10,000 a month). Rohinton Mistry gave a reading to a lot of middle-aged ladies-who-lunched, and two out-of-place young Canadians. We sneaked outside and explored the grounds, which included a lovely grove of eucalyptus trees.

But I digress. The consulate also notified me about a Canada Day event at a downtown bar. My wife and I brought a couple of my work colleagues down to investigate. Curiously, the bar was called Major Tom’s Down Under, and had an Australian theme. There are no Canada-themed bars in Dublin, so I suppose they figured a sister Commonwealth country was close enough. We stepped inside, and entered into a kind of hyper-Canadian party. Young people danced to The Tragically Hip, drank Moosehead Beer and watched Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em videos on the bar’s TVs. My Irish friends were perplexed.

Six years later, we were living in Malta, and were invited to a dinner hosted by the Canadian-Gozitan Society. A Gozitan is a resident of Gozo, the small Maltese island where we lived. The photo for this post shows a plaque on a house in the little village where we lived. Oddly, we never met the owners.

We had a splendid evening and four-course meal at a fancy hotel overlooking Gozo’s gorgeous Mgarr Harbour. Most of the attendees were retired (Malta is full of elderly ex-pats), so the proceedings were a little more staid than in Dublin. Speeches were spoken, and the Canadian national anthem was played over the hotel’s sound system. We sat at a table with some friends from Newfoundland (if memory serves), and talked of our first homes.

Never have I been more patriotic than when I’m living outside of the country. Canada Days spent abroad bring a kind of nationalistic clarity to my love of my country.

Have you spent a Canada Day outside Canada?

Thanks to commenter Natalie, I’ve changed things up for the month of May. This month I’m adding ‘culture’ to the mix.

What do I mean by ‘culture’? Anything cultural that doesn’t fit into one of my other media categories (TV, movies, books, magazines and music). To start, I’ll only be seeing Canadian live performances–theatre, ballet, opera, author readings and so forth–for the rest of the year.

This will be a bit of a sacrifice, because I attend a lot of theatre. So, it’s prairies and raven tricksters for me for the rest of the year. I joke, but when I was in theatre school, it seemed to me that every Canadian play I worked on was either set in a depressed, wind-blasted, incest-riven prairie farm house or on a depressed, wind-blasted First Nations reserve where some traditionally-clad bird dancer hovered over the action. Add in Canadian theatre’s love of historical dramas, and we rarely see a play set in a contemporary Canadian city. There’s always Brad Fraser, I suppose. I just checked, and none of the 2011 plays at either of Vancouver’s biggest theatres, the Arts Club or the Playhouse, qualify as Canadian. I’ll have to seek out some smaller venues.

And then there are cultural institutions. I have a membership to the Vancouver Art Gallery. For the rest of the year, I can only look at Canadian works of art. I’ll be really sorry to miss this Eadweard Muybridge exhibit, for example. Cursed Welshman. A few weeks ago I was in Quebec City, and took care to only look at Canadian paintings at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. I spent my time looking at Jean-Paul Riopelle’s work, and the Modernist review in Salle 7. I’ll do the same when visiting the Vancouver Art Gallery for the rest of the year.

What foreign culture would you miss if you went all-Canadian for a year?

Photo shows Kevin MacDonald in the Arts Club Theatre Company’s
production of Paradise Garden, a Canadian show I saw last year. Photo by Ross Den Otter.