Other exciting things!

So, some other exciting things to catch up on....

Mum came to visit! So she got to meet Neil, and three years on Neil finally met some of my family (I ran into almost his entire family, one way and another, on my first visit to Penticton three months in...)

We did all manner of things Canadian and Ottawan - so far as you can when it's March and still minus 20*c... (Did i mention that it's cold out recently... ;) ) On the first couple of days I was working and she was acclimatizing, but after that we went for wanders around about, saw parliament and different bits of Ottawa, decided last minute to go to a hockey game, which was fantastic (apart from the bit where we lost in the last third...), and then we hot tub-ed and ate ridiculous breakfasts and generally museum-ified.

Mum and Neil at the hockey...

Rather quickly the time flew by and mum was off back to Montreal first (how did that go, mum??) and then Scotland for whatever the next step in the adventure is. 

My next step this week was to take yet more (well-deserved) time off work to do something I've being meaning to do for a little while - get qualified as a ski instructor! This seems a little unattainable off the bat - like you'd need to be some fantastic expert. But actually all the CSIA require of you is to be at least a sound intermediate skier - i.e. there's nothing obviously wrong with your technique, which is a lot more doable. So I just spent the last three days practicing my best snowplow and transitions to skid turns... which is actually a little harder than it sounds - doing the basics not just correctly, but demonstrably correctly takes some time. Still, I got there in the end and hopefully improved my skiing, which was also being judged for three days, in the mean time... I don't have any pics, but on day one i came home soaked through after skiing in the rain for three hours, which is a pretty novel experience in Ottawa actually (Mum, the temperature broke 0*c!!!). Day two was a beautiful blue skies day, but cold, oh so cold, and on day three we got an unexpected half a foot of powder, which was fantastic for the three runs i actually skied in the morning, and not so ideal for doing beginner teaching in, which is what we were being assessed on that day, but c'est la vie - i'll take what i can get. 

At the end of the course we had a nervous wait for the list to see who had passed and thankfully for my pride - working in a ski shop, I had passed.

The most exciting bit - I got both a certificate AND a badge - I've not been given a certificate/badge combination since i was about 11 :D Yeah! Woo snowplow!

Immigration - eek!

I've been absolutely terrible at posting anything this winter, but in my defense, I haven't done much worthy of posting about - it was after all, the coldest Ottawa winter in 20 years, which is really saying something, because as I discussed last year, Ottawa is somewhere in the top 4 coldest capital cities on earth (depending on who's measuring...) Brrrr...

(It's snowed 15cms yesterday and more is forecast for the end of the week!! It's pretty much April...)

One thing I did expend quite a lot of effort on putting together in the autumn (and then just worrying about thereafter) was my application for permanent residency. Last year Neil and I decided that we'd be awfully sad not to be living together and therefore, it would be awesome if I could somehow stay in Canada. That got the ball rolling on my residency application where Neil sponsored me as his common-law partner.

A lot of people have asked me what this involved, so I thought I'd record a little about the process here. As a side note, a number of my Canadian friends and colleagues are rather surprised to hear how many hoops you have to jump through if you want to stay - they seem like they'd be happy to keep me without all the paper work, it's just a shame the government doesn't agree!

So, in short, you have to send in some forms, some money, a medical and a police certificate; which sounds relatively easy... But in practice, i started looking at the forms in May last year and started collecting relevant documents, then after a final push to get everything together and organised and readable, sent them off at the end of October. So it took a little while.

The first few forms you have to fill in aren't so difficult. They cover your basic information, the class of immigration you are applying for, your family and educational background and your sponsor's information. The form that took pretty much all of the time and effort was the 'sponsored person questionnaire'.  This is where you have to give an account and proof of your relationship to your sponsor. So it starts by asking how you met - the easy bit. Although it also asks if gifts were exchanged when you first met your sponsor and whether you are in anyway related to them?! Things you'd never think to ask in the UK (unless you were an immigration consultant, i guess...)

The rest of the form asks you to prove your status as common-law (defined by Canada as living in a spouse-like relationship for at least a year), which is easier said than done when you live in your boyfriend's mum's house... While typically this part would simply require, say, a joint lease agreement, and joint insurance policy on household items or a car or something, we didn't have any of this. We don't have a joint lease, or utility bills, or insurance, and all of Neil's official mail, helpfully, goes to his Penticton address. Moreover, because we met tree planting and did that for two more summers afterwards, we also had three blank months each year with no proof of address at all. Hmm. So in the end I collected my proof of address, from payslips, and after much much persuasion we got something off Neil's university (I can't tell you how much hassle this was though). Additionally, we opened a joint bank account in May, pretty much for the purposes of having something with both our names and an address on (which we now use as fun money for going out and treating one another :) ). For our previous addresses we collected tax forms from the Bike Barn to account for our Augusts, and got Paul (our planting foreman) to get a letter notarized vouching for our relationship in general, and co-habitation specifically, while planting. We, likewise, got a similar letter notarize from Natalie, Neil's mum, saying that we live together in her house and that we are actually a couple with no joint proof whatsoever... Lacking more substantial proof, we also opted to included proof of travel (flights/buses) together and any nights in hotels booked on Neil's card and my email address (this was forward thinking...), which involved trailing though our inboxes looking for confirmations.

Since we are not married, we also have to account for our relationship history. This includes giving dates and proof of trips to see one another prior to living together. For Neil his flight tickets and insurance from visiting me in Italy, for me my Trip to Penticton and Ottawa the first year we met. this was a ticket i just chance upon in my wallet, and it was barely readable, but fortunately did still exist! Beyond this they ask how you communicated in times when you were apart. For us the answer was almost exclusively facebook chat, but also skype, which led me on another long hunt for chat log histories, and yet another hunt for screen captures to authenticate the chat logs, which are just text documents with no identifying features. I followed a similar process when they asked you about gifts/letters/cards that you'd sent to one another. We still had the cards and gifts, which we coped and photographed, but no envelopes with dates - so yet again i cross referenced it it with screen captures of our computer conversations about it... You can see why this took me a while...

After you've done all these specific questions you also have to write an account of your relationship (a horrifically cheesy essay, essentially) and back that up with proof too. Now, by this point, you've already provided just about every scrap of evidence of your relationship that might ever possibly have existed. So the other thing that took me time with this application was to put all of the available evidence into organised appendices and then to cross reference the pieces of evidence with the questions, rather than duplicate an already hefty pile of paper. Question 9, see appendix 6a,8b &c, 9d.... etc... I also got a few more letters of support from friends and Neil's family, saying that we were real people etc and put in about 40 very cheesy photographs to illustrate it.

Finally there was other fiddly bit of paper work that were required - a police check from the UK (despite the fact I'd not lived there for nearly 3 years...), a $200 medical that seemed to think i was healthy enough, an obscure tax form from Neil and both address and travel histories from me for the last 10 years... which as you might imagine were extensive and just generally hard work...  Oh, and a thousand bucks...

Once I had got all of this together, i photocopied everything from originals and organised it again in order and went through it about 10 times for fear of missing anything, quietly wondering whether I was qualified to put together my own immigration application, or whether the lawyers fee might be worth it in the end...  The problem is, if you miss something - a document or s signature, they don't just ask you to send in the form again, they return the whole application to you and you have to start the process again, setting yourself back a good month or more...

Anyhow, in happy news I sent it all in to Mississauga and about a month later, Neil was approved of as my sponsor. Then the real waiting starts and you don't hear anything for a few months, and cross all of your fingers that they don't want you to come for an interview in London (which is where your application ends up, having been sent all the way to Canada in the first place...). Not that I've anything against going to London, but that's an awfully expensive interview...  Thankfully, after a mercifully short wait, in the grand scheme of things, I got my COPR (Confirmation of permanent residence) though at the beginning of the month, and having been gently winding down from the stress of applying, and not know what was going to happen, ever since. Weirdly enough, you can't just be granted this status, you have to take the 2 pieces of paper that grant it to you all the way to the states and re-enter the country before its official. Goodness knows why... but fortunately the border is only an hour away. And so it is that on this fine spring day (8*c!!! And only 15cms of fresh snow on the ground...) we drove down to the border, got ourselves refused from the states and re-entered. the lovely man who wanted to go on his lunch, was fantastically quick at entering my information (no coincidence...) and before long he had answered all my questions and congratulated me.

As of today, I am a citizen of the UK and an official resident of Canada - not a bad combination!!! :D I've almost forgotten the paperwork already...

Road tripping in Quebec, part deux

We had debated the best way to get to Quebec city. None of the routes immediately screamed at us that they were particularly picturesque, but determined to see the best of the area, we chose the route that took us along the banks of the St Lawrence, through the pretty, vintage French settlements. I don't know why this route doesn't get better press. It winds its way along, occasionally throwing spectacular panoramas of the river and it's opposite banks, at you. We stopped a few times on the way there, and then again on the way back too, so much did we enjoy it.

When we got in to Quebec it was very dark, and fairly late, so rather than go exploring, we enjoyed a cup of tea and watched some good ol' Canadian tv and went to bed.

First on our list that day was not the old city or the St Lawrence; as important as these were, we had more pressing issues. The time had come to introduced Lucy and Ben to Tim Horton's! What a great Canadian tradition! I feel like maybe being able to competently order fast food and understand the esoteric standard questions you are being asked, is the mark of some one who is no longer fresh to a country. Lucy and Ben definitely represented better what I looked like when I first got here and was confronted with a Timmy's menu, which is, a little overwhelmed, or a little baffled to say the least... In not entirely sure that the experience quite matched the build up, but there again, they haven't got addicted to it yet, all it would take is a little time. ;-)

Anyways, the sweet of Tim Horton's donuts was quickly matched by the bitter of the parking ticket that we achieved while getting them... Much as we had looked out for parking signs, we had not seen it hidden behind both a big machine and a tree - quel surprise! In fact, if it had been anywhere except Quebec I might have argued that there sign was unreasonably obscured, but I am unable to start an effective argument in French, and unwilling to argue with a French person in English - it seems rude, so that was that. Most expensive breakfast ever. C'est la vie...

Moving on from our breakfast debacle in a remarkably chipper mood, we went to find the citadel and the old town. The citadel was,  surprisingly, actually build by the British. It's quite enormous and does really look like a citadel, Civilisation V stylee, in a star of hugenormous ditches, fortified with quite the stone walls. Inside there's a working military camp to this day.

Not sure why we were cheering, maybe for past British victories... or maybe for puffins... who knows?! (outside the citadel entrance)

For me, the special part of the citadel was on the outside though. We had decided not to pay for, out wait for, the tour that takes you inside and instead went for a walk along the top, which leads to an unsurpassably magnificent urban view. The citadel is on the top of a cliff with the St Lawrence to one side and the old town rolling down the other side of the hill. And so we sat on the hill side for a bit taking in the 20 something degree sun, along with the south banks of the St Lawrence, the autumnal  Laurentian hills in the backdrop and set off by the turrets of the Fairmont hotel in the foreground. :-)

Just chillin'

If you claim nothing else for Quebec, you'd still have to allow that Quebec City is simply  beautiful. I've been told in the past that perhaps Europeans such as myself wouldn't appreciate Quebec as much as the average Canadian because we've already seen European stuff - it's normal to us. But I think it's unfair to say that we wouldn't appreciate it as much; classy is still clay no matter how many times you see it, and besides, I think I found setting a town like this *in north america* pretty much as novel as Neil did, it's just not quite what you expect - plus, it had windy (rhymes with rind, not as in breezy) streets and cobbles :-D  

I love Europe's non-linear streets... Weird thing to miss perhaps, but I guess it's something I come across every single day, so fair enough, I think!

I think it's fair to say we were all pretty impressed with Quebec city. After taking the funicular railway up the hill, we mozied around the shops and drank lots of tea and enjoyed the side walk cafe culture that doesn't really exist in the rest of Canada. We went for a wander on the wall of the city for yet more fantastic views and then topped off the day with a self driven tour through the plains of Abraham park, and an impromptu tour of the old city again while trying to negotiate their traffic system!

Another chilled out evening passed in the company of tea and cocktails, supplemented by the hotel's hot tub and swimming pool! Very nice :-) 

The next morning we were due to head back to Montreal for our bus home, but wanted to stop by Montmorency waterfalls first. A warm up for Niagara, if you like! The falls are just 20 minutes from the centre of the city, which is pretty cool, because usually in Canada they are more of a wilderness thing... And they're also pretty enormous - a little taller than Niagara actually - quite a lot less water, admittedly... but very pretty :)

So, i guess this doesn't give you the best perspective, but its fair to say it was pretty big, and the canyon it has carved over the years, drawing back from the St Lawrence, is pretty impressive!

From there we idled our way back to where we came from, with just enough time to get an epic burger at a pretty epic burger bar that Neil had made it his life's mission to go to (and then eat!)

I offer my beautiful face purely for scale...

...and feeling quite ill, we boarded the greyhound back to Ottawa, quite content with our mini-adventure (TM).

Road-tripping in Quebec

It's been too long since I went on a road trip and I think in order to get the best out of Ontario it's definitely best to leave it for a while and go to Quebec...

I was very keen to show Lucy and Ben Montreal, having been there once before and loved it. And I was actually even more excited to show Neil Montreal; despite having lived in Ottawa (just over 2 hours away) for half of his life, somehow he'd never quite made it. So, on Thursday afternoon we rolled into Montreal and set about finding our home for two days. We were experimenting with Airbnb.com which i had only recently come across, when we got together with a group of tree planting friends post-season this year and stay up near Gibson on the sunshine coast, just north-west of Vancouver. Having had an excellent experience there, we thought we'd try it again here. 

OK, so while writing, i went off on a bit of a tangent about airbnb and how it's under threat in NYC- which you can now find on a separate post - here. 

Our first stop in the city - with the exception of a fantastically cheap Chinese buffet lunch, was the old town and port area of the city. Montreal's old town is small but beautifully formed. It seems to be based around a pedestrianised square in front of the town hall and supreme court, with a couple of blocks worth of streets either side.

It's definitely true to say that it has a distinctly European feel to it - especially when you come across hidden little nooks and crannies in the alleys and court yards.

Last time I was in Montreal, one such court yard was the view from my temporary home, smack bang in the middle of the old town. It was a great place to stay - at 17 dollars a night it was one of the cheapest hostels I've stayed in in north america. It was a loft just packed with bunk beds, divided by curtains, but downstairs it just looked like a normal house, so you could feel at home. The owners turned up once in a while to take payment if they saw you, and if not they'd just charge you in retrospect after you left. Super friendly, awesome place to stay, and with a fantastic view and location in the old town that I found my self returned to now. The weird thing about the last time I was in Montreal, is that I'm not entirely sure how I spent all my time there. Don't get me wrong,I had a fantastic time, but I seemed not to have done much that there was to do. This time we would set that right. So for the rest of the after noon we mingled through the intriguing art and fur shops that are plentiful in the old town. Found a couple of stuffed polar bears for sale - only, like, 20000 dollars, or 30000, if you like...

After that, we started to wander slowly in the direction of the Bell stadium, which is where the NHL team, the Montreal Canadians, plays. I figure that if you want to experience Canadian culture then both a hockey game, and also Tim Horton's for breakfast someday, are both requisite. I had, myself , also never gotten around to going to an NHL game, which seemed like a bit of a travesty. 

That night it was the Ottawa senators vs the Montreal Canadians. Obviously, we were rooting for the Sens. It started out well, but after the first period stated going rapidly down hill... The playing aside though, it was an awesome experience and totally different to seeing it on TV. I guess it was also quite a depart departure from the Giants game I went to in Vancouver too. Firstly, because there's a crowd of close to 20000 people there - mainly rooting for our opposition too! That's pretty cool being in a common cause with so many people (and getting everyone to sing the national anthem!).

I guess the second difference is that it's televised. Some how it had never occurred to me that when you have an ad break in a hockey game, that the game much stop in reality, as well as on TV. So, more frequently than you would expect, every thing just stops and they tidy up the ice a little bit. The result is that an hour and half's worth of game lasts almost an extra hour. Crazy north Americans... Despite this extra stoppage, there was actually way less entertainment between periods in this game than the giants game I went to, perhaps because they know that you're gonna spend quite so much time queuing to get a ridiculously expensive, weird tasting beer. C'est la vie. At the end of the game we were keen to head to bed, having had a long day already, but crowned our evening with some really run of the mill, gooey poutine, in true Quebec style.

The next day we decided to hear out to the botanic gardens. Having done some research, we had collectible decided that this was the main thing to see and do in Montreal. Now I'm pretty sure the last time I was there, I looked into this, thinking out was a good idea, but quickly discounted it after looking at the astounding summer ticket price - somewhere up around 30 bucks. That said, I'm glad we bothered this time. In also glad we went early - by midday there were queues stretching for quite some distance in to the car park. I have never seen such a ridiculously popular garden before - especially one that charges you quite so much to have a look. I figure it truly must be doing something right.  

In fact, it turns out that they do every thing right - well they do bushes and trees very right in any case. And the bushes get special mention. When we went they had an exhibition on called 'mosaics of culture' which is a moving international competition, where counties compete to make living sculptures on the theme of nature. The result is basically the best topiary you've ever seen. Pictures follow.

(Just a small selection - you can see more on my Picasa web albums - here)

Besides the fantastic bushes, the Chinese and Japanese gardens were also of note. We actually saw them twice because at the same time an exhibition lighting up the gardens was running in the evenings, so we returned later that night to see them in all their night time glory. One we'd got there, we almost didn't bother, so popular, again, was the exhibit that the queue for the Chinese garden stretched for quite a distance across the gardens as a whole, with waits of over 30 minutes, at the shortest. They're clearly doing something right...

The next morning we had planned to meet some friends for lunch, and on our way took in the view off mont royal, spectacular as ever, even if i couldn't work out how to get back to the view point I had previously been to up there.

For lunch, Montreal smoked poutine, for the boys at a local Jewish deli, and a good catch up with some tree planting friends. 

Our last stop before leaving Montreal was or third attempt to go and see the Notre Dame basilica. We'd been thwarted on previous occasions by weddings and actual church services - dammit... But Lucy was very keen and I'm glad we got there in the end. It looks pretty much like most churches on the outside, but the interior decor is fantastic, and completely different from the European style too. Super colourful and ornate. We also listen to a fascinating explanation of how key the church was to the origins and expansion of Montreal and the region reaching up to Quebec too. 

By that point it was getting kind of late and we still had a fair drive to go to get to our digs in Quebec city that night. We drive out of Montreal in rush hour traffic, so it took a little while longer than expected, but once we were on to the scenic highway by the river, it was a beautiful drive of scenic villages and views of the river, where we occasionally stopped for pictures, and to stretch our legs, until it got dark when we went onto the highway proper.

Me thinks it's about time I got back to that 'holiday' bit of my working-holiday visa...

Hello long missed (but decidedly not forgotten) blog readers!

I fear I may have been a little remiss this summer year with my blogging efforts. On the up side, the time i spent not quite blogging, was spent being a lumber jack and working on my (now) (almost) fantastic Canadian accent. And while this isn't quite the truth, it's better than telling you that I spent a little too much time (*cough*150 hours*cough*... ehhem....) ruling my own empire on Civilisation V.

Suffice to say, it's high time that i got back to some blogging of the travel variety, seeing as how i am technically doing that thing, and I would do well to remember that (it's a lot more fun that way!) Prompted by the the visit of Ben and Lucy (uni friends from the UK), I have been all over the place in the last two weeks, and I now have many adventures to share.

As a slight pre-amble to such adventures, it is probably fair to say that i spent a good bit of the summer having a pretty good holiday too. Yet again in Penticton, post planting, there was less call for us to help out in the shop this year due to the relocation of the Ironman Canada Triathlon, and as such, I mainly mountain biked, golfed, water skiied and wake boarded, shot at melons and ate good food and wine. Ah. It's a hard life; thanks once again go out to Neil's Dad and Lisa for putting us up and being so fantastically generous!

Right. Summer. Done.

So, to more recent events. Lucy and Ben arrived into a chilly Ottawa evening in late september, and immediately started to remind me why I like travelling. I had previously said to Neil, maybe when he was gently ribbing me for my Englishness sometime, that when Ben and Lucy arrived he would reaslised just exactly how acclimatised (or integrated, maybe) I have become. Despite their status as weary travellers, it was entertaining to hear about how strange it is to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road (and just how BIG and STRAIGHT the roads themselves are themselves), how much space there is, how big the houses are, and how weird the mixture of old and new buildings together is (indeed, the notion that 100 years is REALLY old). I guess i revel in that kind of stuff, i like seeing different stuff and learning why it's different and how people do things, and I hope we managed to share some of that with Ben and Lucy over the next couple of weeks!

First stop, Ottawa. So i realise that I have infact been in Ottawa for a year, but I never really 'did' it properly as a tourist stop, and as such, was a little baffled as to what there might be to see until i started looking it up. It turns out that there were a few cool things and places that I missed the first time round, although, as i had previously said to Lucy and Ben (B&L, hence forth, for my fingers sake) there still was definitely not enough to entertain you for two weeks of touristness. We happily entertained ourselves with the parliament buildings, where i attempted to provide tour commentary from my trusty leaflet i found, but was left somewhat lacking in credibility after i mistook as statue of queen victoria for a statue of (male) Prime Minister Laurier (or one of them...) *sigh* Oh well. I tried. I was only one statue out... Incidently, if in doubt, if it's a statue in Canada, it's probably Victoria. Shes everywhere... you can't escape...
Next up, we went for tea in Byward market where we discovered maple tea, which is very nice indeed. This was the third tea shop we'd visited by that point, having been to the two in Westboro the day before. We have our priorities, us English. The day came to a close with a wonder around the art gallery and gardens and then home-made pizza followed by hot tub. Mm...

Our remaining day was spent visiting the Museum of Civilisation, which I blogged about earlier in the year. It's still worth a second visit, there being so much to take in the first time that I had already forgotten most of it! I figured that this might be a prudent visit to lay the ground for the rest of the vacation, if nothing else; when i first came to Canada, I knew practically nothing about Canadian history, and Canada makes so much more sense as a country and landscape when you know some of the history - particularly the older cities like Montreal and Quebec, which were conveniently next on our list.

But it's late, and that is for a new post some other day... soon... promise... :D

There will also be pictures to come (once they are uploaded onto the interwebity thing).

3k day!

After a slightly frustrating start to the season, with lots of faffing and weird specs, everything settled down a bit. We've had some really good land over the last couple of weeks and have been ma ma making up for lost time.

Last shift we ended up working a one day shift on some really easy land, so we decided as a crew to go for big numbers and personal bests. Since I'd made a three thousand tree day my goal for the season, this seemed like a good opportunity to give it a go. This was quite the under taking for me since my previous best was 2165, and on another day I might have planted 2450 poor so if we'd worked a full day, still more than five hundred short. We went out and had pretty good conditions all day. By 2.30pm I was at 2100ish, and I knew I could do it if I pushed. We switched land for my last bag up and a half which totally screed with my timing. With 30 minutes to go I was 200 trees short, but with one last push I got them in, only a couple of minutes late. 10 hours, 3000 trees. :-)  ( or 5 trees a minute every single minute of the day, not accounting for breaks, rating or badging up ). Suffice to say I was a little shattered that night...

It's sooooo hot...

So, after a night in pg, we grabbed planting gear for the season and headed to quesnel. Quesnel is a sweet town. And our motel is pretty fantastic, although a bit far out of town. No pictures so far but I'll try to take a few sometime.

So far, the season has been dominated by the weather. The first day of training it just rained all day, which was a little unfortunate since most of it involves being outside, looking at the trucks and going over emergency procedures. But from then on, it has been nothing but boiling hot. Our first couple of days on the block were pretty brutal. It was around 25 degrees plus every day and staying hydrated is hard. In the average season you have a couple of weeks to get in shape before the heat his you, but no such luck this year. Still, beats it raining I suppose! Curiously enough, our camp supervisor, was out checking snow levels in pg yesterday in the 27 degree heat! It was snowing last week! Crazy.

Anyways, I guess that's it for the season so far! I'll try to keep this vaguely up to date, since I have my tablet! I hear its sunny back home for the holiday too, hope you all enjoyed!