Before Jan. 1, Canada would not have been on my list of difficult countries to travel to. They speak a familiar (and polite) brand of English; road signs are in kilometers with the mileage in parentheses underneath; their coins are the same size as ours; and native Canadian food is choosing one of 30 kinds of giant doughnuts from a roadside Tim Horton’s with a small, medium, or large coffee. Visiting my friend Erin over New Year’s Eve in Hamilton should have been easy; it’s about an hour’s drive south of Toronto.

Wandering around the city in biting winds, I forgot my scarf in a restaurant. It was gone when I went back inside, so I burrowed into my coat and tried not to look cold. My coat-scarf-mittens weather is sweatshirt weather for the rest of Canada, and shivering marked me a tourist. “Why,” I muttered, “if I am the only cold person in this city, did somebody steal my scarf?”

When I got to Hamilton, Erin told me that we were going to a black-tie party that night. I was wearing sneakers, so she loaned me a pair of boots, a little too small, with three-inch heels. They lifted my feet about a half-inch above the fresh snow.

At 9:30, the public bus up the mountain in the center of Hamilton dropped us off on 22nd Street, where we cheerfully started towards 36th Street.

“Are you sure that’s where the house is?”

“Yeah, I mapquested it.”

Four blocks later, my feet were starting to get cold, and my ankles hurt. After eight blocks, I remembered that Erin was wearing shoes without toes. She sipped Southern Comfort from a flask to keep her toes warm. My heels slipped – I cursed and fell over, smearing snow all the way down my front. I wanted my scarf.

Fourteen blocks later, after we had all stopped talking, we turned down the cross street and found a dead end. The closest house was number nine. We were looking for 306.

“You mapquested it?”

“I guess north was the other way.”

We turned around and slogged on, and, fourteen blocks later, we were at the right house. My feet were stiff, cold, and bright red; but Erin couldn’t even feel hers anymore. We threw our shoes into a slushy pile at the door, and I wondered why we had needed dress shoes.

“Be careful,” Erin told me, “sometimes people steal those.”

“Why?”

“That’s just what we do for fun here.”

We arrived around 11:00, and the party, in typical New Year’s style, fell apart minutes past midnight. Erin called a cab.

Erin, her boyfriend Greg, and I shared the backseat of one cab back to Erin’s apartment. Snow was flurrying most of the night, but it had gotten heavier while we were inside, and the roads were slick.

Our cabbie sarcastically asked why, exactly, we couldn’t drive ourselves home while he hurtled the cab down the mountain. We glanced quickly back and forth while we skidded through curves, but just stayed quiet and held on to the doors.

Four blocks from Erin’s apartment, our cabbie still hadn’t slowed down. Given directions to turn, he took a left too fast and slipped into the wrong lane. We hit an oncoming pickup truck head-on. I was sitting in the middle, and when we started to slip, Erin grabbed me and pulled me practically into her lap, keeping me from flying forward and hitting the plastic console between the two front seats.

The cab caught the pickup’s left headlight, pivoted and spun in a circle, then slowed down and stopped in the center of the road.

We tumbled out and looked. No one in either car was hurt, but we were all shaken up. Greg had a gash across his collarbone where his shoulder belt bit into his skin. The crash crumpled the cab’s front-end and pushed metal strips into the front tires.

I idly wondered: if I had died while I was wasted, would I have stayed drunk for all eternity?

We stared at the cars for a few minutes, and finally decided to walk home before the police arrived. Someone paid the cab fare.

The next morning I had a black bruise the size of my open hand across my leg, and limped from either the car crash or the high heels. I’d also lost my bracelet, an earring, and my cell phone.

I’m never going to Canada again.