Honorary Canucks

I'm pretty sure that flying from Beijing to Toronto was the worst idea ever - a 12 hour flight with a 12 hour time change.  We left Beijing at 6pm Tuesday night and arrived in Toronto at 6pm Tuesday night.  Lucky for us, we had Stephen's timezone travel tricks though, so we've been mostly fine - just a little tired.

Stephen's timezone travel tricks involves only one rule - as soon as you get on the plane you're in the new timezone, and you behave like it - no napping, appropriate meals etc.  It works pretty well - so on our flight from Beijing to Toronto, we were leaving at 6am Toronto time and arriving at 6pm Toronto time - we slept for the first 2 hours of the flight (after all, who'd be awake before 9am?), and then stayed awake for the rest of the flight.  It was a bit of a struggle to stay awake, but we really wanted to sleep that night :)  We're mostly in the right timezone now, which is good.

Once we arrived at the airport, it was pretty smooth sailing - we waited in a queue at Immigration behind about 50 Chinese people who didn't have visas and didn't speak any English, and I think the guy processing our visa was relieved to talk to us rather than them.  We now have a pretty piece of folded paper in our passports that says that we're honorary Canadians (sort of) for 2 years, with the right to work.

Our first day we got right into it (well we did wake up at 6am - we didn't totally escape timezone craziness), heading down to Service Canada (government office) at 9:30am to get our Social Insurance Numbers - it seems a bit like an Aussie Tax File Number, only you give it out to everyone and carry it on a card in your wallet.  You need it to work and apply for housing and bank accounts and pretty much everything, it seems.

We were expecting that to take hours and it ended up taking about 15 minutes, so we were at a bit of a loss for what to do.  We ended up heading to a shopping centre and quizzing people about mobilecell phones for a while - the system over here is really odd.  Stephen has a 4 year old Nokia phone which he wanted to put on prepaid, and the first few places we went to said that their network was too new for it?  I didn't really get that.  I had a different problem - I want to have my phone prepaid, but with data.  No one will do it without ludicrous costs ($7 a week - I was expecting $10 a month tops...).  Stephen ended up finding a network that will take his phone, but I'm still hanging out hoping that some sort of solution will drop from the sky on to us - otherwise the only other option is a $50 a month "prepaid plan" which includes data, which seems a bit ridiculous when I don't actually know anyone to call in Canada except Stephen.  If you're after our Canadian mobile number, send one of us an email and I'll send it through.

We started house-hunting pretty early as well, which has been the most confusing thing we've done so far.  There's no such thing as a realestate.com.au over here, and it looks like most places are rented out directly from the owner rather than from a real estate agent like in Australia.  We've looked at two places so far - rent isn't as cheap as I'd expected (for anywhere half decent), but after Sydney prices, it seems pretty reasonable. At the moment we're hoping to get a 2 bedroom non-basement place walking distance from the subway and pretty close to the city, and we're finding quite a bit out there.  We looked at one place yesterday which was pretty dodgy, and another place today which was awesome, so we've put in an application for the awesome one - our unemployed statuses and lack of such simple things as Canadian bank accounts let alone credit ratings are working against us, so we've attached bank balances and detailed rental histories and references from landlords to our application in hopes that evens it back into our favour.  Fingers crossed!

Our hostel isn't as great as we were hoping - we booked a "private double room", which we found out on arrival has a double bed under a single bed (bunks), and no ensuite.  Worse, the mattress is coated in plastic - so every time you roll over it sounds like clock-on time in a plastic bag factory - I'm having real trouble sleeping.  On the bright side, we used the hostel kitchen to cook spaghetti bolognese for dinner tonight - it was really nice to have something "home"-made to eat after 3 weeks of take-out.

Tomorrow is Stephen's birthday, so to celebrate, we're planning a day trip to the Toronto Zoo to see some polar bears and other Canadian animals.  Normally I'd have some sort of elaborate birthday plan, but being as we only arrived in the country 2 days ago and we're living in a tiny box-room and spending all of our time together, it's a bit hard.  I'm sure I can find some birthday cake somewhere though :)  And on Saturday morning the wonderful Jess arrives to keep us company for a week or so on her way to San Diego.  Exciting!