I must look like an anglophone. More often than not, when I approach the person behind the counter without saying a word, they greet me in English. I haven't been here long enough for people to recognize me as an anglo, I'm not wearing a nametag, and I'm going for "professional yet nondescript" with my clothing and accessories, none of which have visible brand names. I take these English greetings as a gift, (after taking care to make sure I don't have anything on me that identifies me with my professional affiliation), but so as not to come across as the Ugly Ontarian I affect a vaguely Eastern European accent. I do this in slow and precise English, to which I systematically add phonetic features of German, Russian and Polish. Worst case I'm taken as an Ugly Ontarian, which I am. Best case I'm taken as a random allophone who is using the official language of her choice (in which she seems to be fluent).

You have to cross the road differently in this neighbourhood. The cars don't seem to think they need to let pedestrians cross. They aren't disgustingly aggressive as in some European cities, but at a 4-way stop it doesn't seem to occur to them to let the pedestrians go first. In my neighbourhood, pedestrians seem to have right-of-way at intersections on back streets. But then my neighbourhood has enough of a street life on the main streets that people are always running across the street, and cars on the main streets expect pedestrians to dart out at any time. No one goes to the intersections to cross Yonge Street, they just wait a couple of minutes at the curb until there's a break in traffic, or until a few other people have accumulated near them at the curb, and then just run across. This behaviour translates to the back streets, where everyone assumes the cars at the stop signs will let the pedestrians across. But in the neighbourhood where I am now, one main street is a sort of cross-town expressway that doesn't have its own street life, another contains big government buildings that empty at 5 and leave the streets abandoned. The back streets contain random slightly shabby-looking houses (picture the type of house that you could find both in the north end of Hamilton and in a formerly propserous Newfoundland fishing village). There are buses, but this is the terminus of the routes, and they seem to serve only the government buildings. So even crossing tiny streets just block from bus routes, you still can't assume that the cars will expect they have to yield.