It's now February and we've been here for one month. we spent most of the that month trying to organise an apartment, who'd have thought it'd take 4 weeks?! in a country where we speak the same language. In HK I found an apartment and moved in, in under one week. The rigmarole went on and on one thing after another with this Canada move.
First up we were meant to arrive way back in September 2009 but Kate's company outsources the HR for their international moves, the HR company only sent us the paperwork we had to fill in on the 16th August, informing us at that time that once completed it would take six to eight weeks for Canada Immigration to process the paperwork. As with any paperwork it took us more than a day to fill it in correctly and once that was done it had to be sent to this HR company who then sent it to their Canadian lawyers who checked over the paperwork and sent it on to the Canadian Consulate in London, who duly kept the paperwork for 7 weeks, decided we were allowed to go Canada and sent it back to us. This whole process took us up to December 11th, 2009. The following week Kate and I took a one week trip to Toronto so she could complete some work and I could view some potential houses.
The house viewing went well and we saw a few that we liked and put in an offer to rent one in particular. We left Canada returning to the UK for Christmas pleased that we'd have an apartment to move into when we returned to Canada. A few days after Christmas we received an email informing us that the we had not been able to rent our desired apartment. I'm sure you can imagine we were somewhere between disappointed and irritated that we had lost this apartment. After throwing a lot of blame around it was later discovered that the leasing agent had forgotten about us and had given the apartment to someone else, it's amazing that this person is actually able to operate.
We returned to Toronto on the 30th December, 2009. We came out before the New Year because a friend/colleage of Kate's had invited us to a party and we thought it would be good to go make some new friends. The party was great despite the jet lag, which was pretty ruthless. Anyway Kate started work immediately and I start looking for work and looking for a house. Turns out that this isn't the best time of year to find a house, so choices were thin and are criteria was tight, we knew what we wanted and it was just a matter of time until we found it. After much looking we eventually came across the house we now reside in, looking quite poor on the outside, it turned out to be very nice on the inside and we decided to take it the day we saw it, so our agent started the paperwork. It turns out the landlord got a bit confused with the fact that Kate and I would be living here and her company would be staying, and the lawyers made something quite simple, hugely complicated. This process ran out for a couple of weeks, making myself and Kate quite stressed and immensely frustrated. Having a lot of second thoughts about whether it was an apartment worth all this hassle.
We are now in the apartment and after having more hassle from Leon's furniture store over the delivery of our furniture which we cancelled because of the hassle it was causing. We now have a lovely mattress and little else in the way of furniture. We do have all our belonging out of storage which is wonderful, especially as everything went into storage for shipping back at the end of August.
Here are a few pictures of the moving in process:
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