A word on Canadians. Specifically Vancouverites.

(They love to dress up. Halloween is nearly too much for them. I dressed up as a Canadian for our work Halloween party. They asked me where my costume was..)

1. They don’t do last minute.
Spontaneous they are not. They have every bank holiday and long weekend planned months if not years in advance. For example, you might find yourself discovering that there’s an upcoming long weekend and decide to take off out of the city only to discover that every resort, hotel, camp ground and hut has been booked out for the past six months. None of your last mintue get aways, unless you think deciding something four months ahead is last minute.
Also, when someone says “meet you at six for a drink” they mean that literally, or you tell someone to come over for dinner around 8ish, they will be on your doorstep at 8. On the button.


2. They get to the cinema while you’re still at home deciding what film to see.
They don’t do reserved seating over here so as a result they all get to the cinema a good hour in advance it seems. They’re also huge fans of reserving an entire row of seats for their buddies. Once again, it kind of throws last minute plans out the proverbial window.

3. They love to line up. (That’s queuing to you and I)
They’ll think nothing of standing in line for an hour or two. It’s sort of a national past time. They love a good line up. Outside restaurants, bars, musuems, shows, you name it there’s a line up. And its not an Irish line up which is just a collection of people pushing in the same direction, survial of the fittest style, over here it’s a neatly organised, single person line.

4. They don’t go to a bar to banter with strangers (or rather they can’t)
Most bars have a person greet you at the door, find out how many are in your party and seat you at a table accordingly. This presupposes that you know exactly how many people will be joining you whereas back home you never knew who would make it out for a few drinks and at what time they might show up. If you have a table for five and a sixth person shows they get a bit fussy. (how dare you have more than your specified amount of companions in this public house).
Once seated you then have an appointed server who does table service meaning you have no real reason to chat to anyone else because everyone is sort of incubated at their respective tables. Nobody stands around and chats. I think this is one of the reasons that it can be hard to get to know people over here, bars are not structured to incur a bit of banter and chat. It’s quite formal and organised.

Cars: To buy or not to buy..

We got carried away when we arrived and bought one of those Jeep Wranglers that were really cool about twenty years ago. The first pictures are from when we were happy saps with our new car and with its roof off in the summer. The next photo is of the car being towed away after it basically fell apart on the side of the road on Vancouver Island a few months later. It was fun while it lasted. Which was about four months.

If you live in downtown Vancouver you don’t really need a car. The city is small enough that you can walk to most places and its pretty bike friendly too (not to mention rollarblades but I won’t judge…). Public transport is quite good, the buses are pretty frequent and full of interesting characters and the skytrain (a flamboyant name for a 1980s monorail) takes you out east if you are so inclined. I’ve been on it once and that was plenty for me.

But given that you will be a bit of a tourist for the first while you will probably want to be going places and seeing things and a car is pretty handy for the odd epic adventure. So here are some options to consider

Zip Car and Co-Op Cars
There are two interesting services to make note of over here that act as decent substitutes to owing a car.
1. Co-op cars
2. Zip cars.

I don’t know much about the former but I was a Zip Car member for a while. Basically you pay about $50 to join which means you have access to Zip Cars in your neighbourhood (or anywhere in the world for that matter). You go online, put in your location and the length of time you need a car and the kind of car you want, and it calculates your options. The average cost of a car is about $12 per hour (approx) depending on whether you want a trusty Nissan or a funky Mini or a family car of sorts. It’s pretty handy if you need a car for a couple of hours on weeknights, but beware that we ended up cancelling our memberships because it became so popular that it was pretty hard to get a car if you didn’t book it well in advance (we tended to wake up on a Saturday and decide we wanted a car in an hour which proved to be wishful thinking)

Renting
You can rent cars all over downtown, they do good weekend packages and some even do monthly packages (or at least they did when the car industry was taking a battering)

Buying
Cars are easy to buy here and they are pretty affordable. You can buy a car in the morning, drive to the insurance company get it insured and have it home by lunchtime. The ICBC (Insurance Corporation of British Columbia) is a good thing, because unlike Ireland where all insurance companies are independent meaning you get a variety of quotes per dealer, the inusrance system is centralised over here, so your quote will be the same no matter what dealer you go to. Its nice that the system is so transparent.

If you want to take advantage of the no claims bonus, you will need to get your insurance company to fax the relevant documents to your insurance dealer here. Otherwise you pay a tonne extra.

Insurance is pretty pricey though so that can make owning a car difficult, even if the car itself doesn’t cost much. Check out Craigslist to get an idea of prices.


Parking
Parking is damn expensive in this city. And they tow you and ticket you the way the Irish clamp you. If parking isn't included in your monthly rent, a space can cost anywhere from about $50 to $150 a month. So just keep that one in mind.

Borrow mine.
Audrey the Audi sits outside our house looking for love and attention, and somebody to clean all the segul shit off her windows.

What to do when you've landed - Social Security number, accomodation, banks accounts, cell phones and other joyous things

When I was moving here I had little knowledge about what to do beyond getting from the airport to downtown. How do you get on with life when you’ve just moved to a new country?

Well, there are a few things to sort of focus yourself in the first few weeks, including.:
1. Social Security Number
2. Renting a place
3. Getting a cell phone
4. Opening a bank account

But you have no idea where to start, who to trust, who not to trust, and you could do days of research (and probably should) but you could also read this to help you along.

1. Get yourself a social security card and number.
If you have come over with USIT then you will go to one of those SWAP orientation meetings, and they will sort out your card for you and it will be posted to your address. If you don’t have a Canadian address they will hold it for you at their offices downtown. A social security card allows you to work in Canada and is used for your employment, taxes etc.

2. Sorting out somewhere to live and furnishing it
I wrote about this a few weeks back, so scroll down to April entries for more info. Bascially though, craigslist is a pretty safe bet. If you do happen to rent an unfurnished place, craigslist is also a decent spot to buy used furniture and general stuff for the house. Of course, there are plenty of sketchy offers and you have to choose carefully but you can find some good deals. There are a lot of people contatntly on the move in and out of Vancouver (moving back to Toronto for example) and sell the entire contents of their condo. Also, garage sales are pretty big in this part of the world. Can’t say I’ve bought much at those, but each to their own.

Tip: Just so you know, most rental accom asks for one months damage desposit as well as the first months rent. Many places also ask for post dated cheques for the 12 months, so basically this is just you writing a cheque that can be cashed on the first of each month and not before it, which the owner can cash and not have to come to you each month looking for pay.

3. Getting a cell phone
Cell phones are expensive here. The main networks/carriers are:
TELUS – equivalent to O2
Koodo – owned by TELUS, but is their younger brand.
Rogers – more of a Vodafone
Fido - Owned by Rogers, but their cheap and cheerful brand. More like Meteor

From what I can tell, Fido seems to be the cheapest. I’m with TELUS but only because they used to be my client and I got a discount on an iPhone. Otherwise I would likely be with Fido.
Networks charge you for incoming calls over here, which is ridiculous. The telecoms industry seems to be quiet behind Europe in many ways, and everything is done by contract, which makes phones quite expensive.

I suggest having a phone card. They are super cheap for international calls, keeping the Irish mammy happy.


4. Opening a bank account.
Within a short time, you no doubt will be rolling in wealth and will need somewhere to keep your obscene amounts of money.
If you bank with HSBC back home, they supposedly look after transferring accounts internationally, however in practice I don’t know how accurate that is. They call themselves the world’s local bank, but from experience I think that is nothing more than a slogan crafted by a ambitious copywriter somewhere.

Canada’s big banks are:
BMO (Bank of Montreal)
Scotia Bank
RBC (Royal Bank of Canada)
TD Bank
CIBC

Banks, like cell phone companies, enjoy charging people for things that banks at home do not. (not that Irish banks are exactly the poster children of honesty). They charge for cash withdrawls from ATMs (there are certain ways around this) and a host of other excess charges.

I don’t know enough about banks over here to make any sort of suggestions about which ones are the most competitive, however, look at things like:
- Credit history. You won’t have one in Canada, so what sort of credit card limit are they prepared to negoitiate.
- AIRMILES on credit cards. What are they prepared to give? ( I know that CIBC is pretty good in this regard)
- How many transactions/withdrawls can you make per month before they start charging you


Also to consider are credit unions. Credit Unions are slightly different to the ones at home, firslty they are for-profit and are larger and very secure and offer competitive rates. Credit Unions in this part of the world include:
Vancity
Coast Capital
Westminster Savings

If I was doing it again, I would seriously consider opening my chequing account with Coast Captial. They have no charges.

Visiting other countries while in Canada on a visa

Many folks want to know if its ok to leave Canada and head to the US or elsewhere while on a working visa.
The answer is YES.

DRIVING
You need to have your passport and working visa with you. If you travel by car, you have to get out of the car at the US/Canada border and go into the office to get your green card (like when you travel to the US out of Ireland). There’s generally little hassle involved. It just adds about 30 minutes to your trip.

Driving back into Canada again you will need passport and visa. The Canadian border police are pretty decent, they want to see your visa and make sure you are legitimately entering Canada.

FLYING
No hassle flying out of Canada, returning through immigration however, they will look at your visa and likely ask you questions about what you are doing in Canada, what you are working at, and ask you what your plans are when your visa comes to an end.

We have had no hassle coming in and out of YVR (Vancouver airport) and that includes trips to the US, Europe and Mexico.

Holiday/Vacation Time.

This might not be your immediate priority when planning a move to Vancouver, but its something that we hadn’t thought much about before moving here.

In Ireland we were used to about five weeks holidays if not more. So it came as something of a shock to the system when we were told the standard is TWO WEEKS per year. I know that that’s how it works in the US, but I thought Canada might be a little more flexible.

Obvisouly some companies are more open to negotiating increased holiday time than others, but in general, they seem pretty set in their ways.

So if you are moving from the other side of the world and you use a week holiday at Christmas time to go back to your home country, that leaves you with little time to take holidays in Canada throughout the year. To be frank, this has been a real pain in the backside for us.

Incidentally though, the price of domestic air travel is pretty prohibitive anyway (I’m just full of good news in this post). Seriously though, a return flight to Toronto is about $700, and return to Calgary is about $300. So for that kind of cash you might get used to staying put on the west coast.

There’s plenty to do in this part of the world, well for at least the first year anyway.
Brief overview of close-ish road trip options as follows (including approx. travel times)

Whistler – 2 hours by car
Squamish (about 1 hour south of Whistler)
Seattle, Washington – 3.5 hours by car
Portland, Oregon – 7 hours by car
Kelowna – 5 hours by car
Vancouver Island ( need to take BC ferries) 1.5 hours
Tofino (Vancouver Island) 5 hours inc. ferry
Victoria (Capital of BC on the Island) 3.5 hours

Photos of Vancouver

Some shots of Vancouver and surrounding spots like Whistler and Tofino on Vancouver Island.

You’ve got a one year visa – what if you want to stay on?

I'm not sure about you but before I moved to Vancouver I had some pretty fixed images in my mind of what it would look like. Here are two pictures of the West End, overlooking the Pacific, where there are some pretty nice sunsets. When its not pissing rain.

Chances are twelve months in Vancouver will fly by and soon you will find yourself getting a bit scared by the expiry date on your working visa, and the foot note stating that it cannot be extended (although I think this might have changed for the 2010 USIT visa, if anyone can confirm that, let me know)

The Irish Mammys will hate me for saying it, but its easy to get pretty comfy over here. I know mine is none too happy about my being on this side of the world (they make a shite cup of tea she claims)

The year passes so quickly in this part of the world, I know that that is purely perception based, but I’m convinced that it’s to do with the fact that there are four distinct seasons in this part of the world, comapared to Ireland’s one season, the lesser known WRINGER (WINTER SPRING SUMMER rolled into one tweleve month season)

I’ll share my experience of what we did when we decided about eight months into our stay that we wanted to stay on. Our respective companies were onto us about our impending expiry dates of our visas, and fortunately, offered to sponsor us. In British Columbia there is a programme called the Provincial Nomination Programme (PNP) which is basically a form of fast tracking visas for employees in specific industries or companies.
Here is a lin that explains the programme a lot more efficiently than I could: http://www.welcomebc.ca/en/immigration/come/work/about/index.html

Most medium to large size companies have a good bit of experience in sponsoring foreign employees, their HR people will be pretty familiar with the process and likely have a lawyer that specialises in immigration law working with them to help the process along.

The net result of PNP is that you end up with Canadian residency, which means you have a residents card. After about five years of that you will be eligble to apply for Canadian citizenship. I’m pretty far from that stage, so I don’t know much about it. Other than the fact that you have to take an exam that tests you about beer and bears and maple syrup and other important Canadian things.

I’ll probably get thrown out of the country for taking the piss out of them on this blog. Better stop.