I appreciate your Kandor

So Foo picks me up today to go have dinner before getting comics (even though we're retarded and Monday was a holiday here so we don't get them till tomorrow). As I'm walking to the car which I can't really see into because of the sun glaring off the windows, the front door opens and some Chinese dude gets out. I'm like, uh, hi there? Mark says, hey, this is Mike. Mike says, hi, I think you know my brother! And then I'm thinking, okay, this must be Dave's bro who I knew lived in Toronto... I wasn't sure why he was here with Foo, but whatever, it's Dave's brother, so cool. So we head out for dinner at the all-you-can-eat sushi place, which is awesome. As we're leaving, he asks if we're interested in photography and pulls out his camera. I just figure he's really proud of it (it was a pretty bitchin' camera) and again, don't think much of it. (Sadly, as we were walking out, part of the lens spontaneously detached for no apparent reason :( ) We get outside to the car and he says, darn, I can't fix this, i was going to take a picture of you guys... then Mark goes and grabs MY camera from the car, which I thought was odd, but didn't really worry about it much (apparently I'm just WAY too trusting). Then he pulls this big box that I didn't really notice out of the back seat. And tells me to open it. Now I'm confused... but I open it... cautiously. I will let the pictures tell the rest of the story.








Anyway, you guys are awesome. I was TOTALLY blindsided by this. And well done keeping it a secret!


Also, as a bonus, as we were getting in the car we noticed a mysterious object floating in the sky...

For lack of anything better to do...

I'm gonna go ahead and start the next chapter in my saga, which should bring us up to the start of school. This one'll be shorter, I swear.

So when I first got here, we had an apartment, but couldn't move in just yet. So we spent the first few days in Mark's mom's basement. Now, they have a dog, and I have a cat... so that was interesting. The dog is a total wuss and would just whimper whenever he saw the cat. Possibly because my cat is the size of a small car and was hissing at him, possibly just because Koby is a pansy. Once we were allowed to move in, we started taking my boxes over a few at a time. We didn't actually "move in" until we'd made a massive Ikea run.

A short aside regarding the Furniture Shopping Extravaganza : we'd decided that we would try to split the cost, since although I am not working, my final paycheck from the Zoo included my sick and vacation time payouts and was pretty sweet. However, both Wells Fargo and Citibank have excellent fraud protection, and took one look at this $1500 charge in a different country and said "I don't think so". They both called me within a few hours to confirm that my cards weren't stolen or my accounts compromised, which really is pretty cool when you think about it. But still, at the time, it was kind of a pain.

Lacking a truck of any kind, we had Ikea deliver the bulk of our stuffs and then we got to put it all together, whee! Now we had a couch, a bed, a place for the TV... so it was time to move in for real. There was still a week or so before school started, so I got to do a lot of the rest of the shopping I needed to get all settled in, as well as make an early trip to the school to get my bearings and my books. Oh, and then on the Sunday before school started, we went to see Spidey 3 in IMAX.

Told ya it'd be shorter. It wasn't very interesting, really, but it bridges the gap. I'll try to do better next time, when I start detailing some of the differences I've noticed between Toronto and San Diego.

Actual weather! ZOMG!

Hooray, thunderstorms! I took the first picture from our balcony about 10 minutes after getting home today. The second picture was about 30 seconds later when it suddenly became extremely windy and there were itty bitty balls of hail flying around. Thank goodness it was warm (26c, 80F) or it could have been trouble! There was even a brief tornado watch!

Oh, this one I just thought was kinda pretty.

Getting here

I guess a good place to start would be to describe what a pain in the arse it was to actually get here in the first place. Let's start with the insane amount of red tape you have to wade through in order to immigrate to Canada. Whee!!! (This is gonna be a long one, folks...)

Now, pretty much anyone from the US is allowed to live in Canada for up to 6 months at a time... but they aren't allowed to work. You can get a TEMPORARY work permit, but only if you already have a job offer (easiest if your present employer has a Canadian branch or whatever.) Alternatively, you can apply for a Skilled Worker visa, which involves lots of crazy paperwork (like a Department of Justice background check) and can take up to 2 years. 2 YEARS!!! Who wants to wait that long?

As I previously mentioned, you can ALSO come to Canada on a student visa. This is also temporary, but it does allow you to work on campus for the duration of your visa, or to apply for a part-time temporary off-campus work permit as long as you have an offer in your field of study. Hopefully, that part will come later for me. For now, though, the student visa is adequate. Having a diploma or degree of some kind from within Canada also makes it (supposedly) easier and faster to receive a Skilled Worker visa, which has NO restrictions on when, where, or for how long you can live and work in Canada. So I'll be applying for that fairly soon, and hopefully it will be processed / approved and all that jazz before my student visa expires and they try to deport me. Another consideration here is whether I eventually try for my MLIS at the University of Toronto or not. A Skilled Worker visa would qualify me as a permanent resident and would let me take advantage of reduced tuition fees, as well as giving me more flexibility as far as working.

So that's background info. In order to apply for a student visa, you first need to apply for an appropriate college-level program (duh). I applied for the LITA program at Seneca in Toronto (which is basically a Community / Technical / Continuing Ed school). Oddly enough, the tuition for International Students was comparable to the tuition for a similar program in San Diego. The same is also true for the International tuition for the MLIS at the U of T. Score one for Canada! Now I don't expect this program to be terribly challenging for me, but it will definitely be nice to have some kind of FORMAL library education to fill in any weak spots I have. Once I received my acceptance letter, I had to pay the tuition, which is one of the requirements of the student visa application. They want to make sure you can afford to live in Canada for the duration of your studies even if you aren't able to find a job, and part of that is being able to pay tuition. So getting that out of the way ahead of time looks good to La Migra. So I submitted all my paperwork and then some (better safe than sorry, I say) and about 2 weeks later got my letter of approval from Canadian Immigration. Halfway there!!

Now I had to make my actual travel arrangements. Getting myself there was easy; getting all my stuff, not so much. My options were to hire a moving company (for $2K-$4K, depending on whether I brought my furniture too); rent a U-Haul and drive myself for around $2K plus whatever for gas and hotels and such; or pack up the necessities and mail 'em. I went with option C, and became VERY familiar with my local UPS store. I thought that would be the easiest, cheapest option. If I had to do it again, I'd hire movers, if only to avoid the tremendous hassle of dragging everything to the store, filling out endless paperwork, and then having to deal with Customs bullshit here on this end. Live and learn. Moving Munchie, my cat, turned out to be one of the easiest parts of the whole deal. All he needed was a rabies shot, a certificate from a vet that he was healthy enough to travel, and a call to the airline to save him a spot in the cargo hold (for an extra $75). Oh, and a tranquilizer from the vet for the little guy so he wouldn't hyperventilate himself to death on the way.

I started mailing stuff straight to Mark about 2 weeks before I left, and sent out the last group of boxes the day before my flight. I JUST got the last box last Friday, and it was one I'd sent expedited, 2-day air. Fucking Customs. We had to drive down to the Customs office at the airport and clear it in person. Also, when they open your boxes for inspection, they CHARGE you. They call it a "brokerage fee". It's such a racket, it's incredible. Anyhow, by this point, I have most everything I needed. There are still a few boxes of less-critical things in my mom's garage, which I will probably have her send out eventually. Right now, though, it's a pain to have things from UPS delivered to our apartment, so they'll have to wait a bit.

The last part of my journey, naturally, was the actual journey itself. The flight itself was fairly standard and uneventful. Getting my visa and going through customs on the other end was a bit more interesting. When you land in Canada, you go through a preliminary Customs interview before you pick up your baggage. In most cases, this is all you have to do, and then they let you loose on the unsuspecting Canadian public. Some times, however, they send you... elsewhere. Last time I came here, since my study permit application was already in the system, they sent me to Immigration to make sure I wasn't going to try to stay here until I was authorized. This time, I was sent to Immigration to finalize my visa. It was surprisingly fast and easy - I think they were just so relieved to have someone who spoke fluent English and had actually followed the proper procedures, they just sped me on through. Seriously, the 2 people on either side of me were there with nothing but a passport and were trying to immigrate on the spot. Don't work that way, folks. So they stapled my visa into my passport, stamped it a few times, and out I went. Next, I had to pick up my bags, and of course, my cat. Who was completely stoned and totally out of it. Then they sent me into the second Customs area, for a more thorough inspection. Honestly, if it wasn't for the cat, I think I would have skipped this part too. But they had to verify that he had his shots and things. This part was interesting... I was literally the only white person in there aside from the Customs personnel. They were pulling all kinds of crazy stuff from the bags of these 2 Chinese families, I can't even identify most of it. So again, when they get to me and my furry friend, it's a piece of cake. Although everyone assumes by the size of his carrier (he's a 20 pound beast) that it's a dog, and are amazed when they actually see the "little" guy.

Last paragraph. I promise. Thank you for putting up with my little essay here, and for staying awake to the bitter end. Now you're all caught up, at least to April 27th which was the day after I arrived. Next update I'll try to cover the week before school started, with the moving and the settling and stuff.

An introduction

Hallo hallo! Welcome to my brand new blog. And welcome to my introduction. Soon enough, I'll follow up with updates and observations and such regarding not just my quest for official Librarianhood, but also differences between life in Canada and life in California. There are many, most of them minor, few major, but all interesting (to me, anyway).

Here are the basics for anyone who doesn't already know what's going on: I met a dude on the internet (playing City of Heroes, actually) and eventually decided to travel to Toronto to meet him and another CoH friend. It went so well that eventually I decided to try to move to Canada to see how it would all work out. I'd been thinking about leaving San Diego (my hometown) for a while anyway, just to try to get out of my rut, so it wasn't as crazy an idea as it might sound at first. Also, I've been working in libraries since I was in college over 10 years ago, but never really had any formal library education. I'd also been thinking about going back to school to remedy that. It was my mom's suggestion to combine the two, and it turned out to also be the fastest, easiest way to legally move to and possibly work in Canada, albeit temporarily.

So that's the story here, in a nutshell. And, away we go!