Many many thanks for all the well wishes. WE HAVE ARRIVED!!!
The past couple of weeks has been a mildly stressful experience with need to consolidate our lives into 46kg each. We have put sentimental things into storage in Bots and in JHH- these things can follow through later or as friends and family visit, we can slowly transfer things over.
We left on Tuesday evening with a Dubai-Seattle-Edmonton routing. 33 hours in total with Dubai to Seattle being a 13 hour daytime flight. Almost as bad as the JHB to Atlanta leg. It was nice to land at Edmonton as it's not one of the major immigration points of entry and we were the only "newbies" going through the process. It took us about an hour for them to process our work permits and verify all of our documents. So as we stand we have 2 year permits from the day of entry, not approval in SA. We are still waiting on the permanent residence applications as our primary goal but this interim phase sure does take the pressure and uncertainty off us.
First hurdles- car rental: Budget spat out my credit card even though I had requested international travel with RMB. Borrowed their land line for a call to the help centre and they confirmed it had been done. I used the ATM and that was not a problem either. Eventually we tried two other rentals and Hertz had the luck in getting us some wheels!
Hurdle 2: Waze and Google maps need data! We managed to find a mall close to the airport and singed up for prepaid bundle contracts at 20:30 at night. For R600 a month we have unlimited Canadian phone calls, SMS and 12GB a month.
We managed to get through to our AirBNB and crashed at 06:00 SA time or 23:00 here. LONG trip but ever so exciting!
Todays adventures will included setting up local bank account, Social Insurance Number and then start looking at some trucks. Insurance is going to be interesting as the lack of "Canadian history" can bump up the premiums...
Edmonton outskirts from the sky
The Rocky Mountains:
Topic: How to Canadian- We're making the move (Read 2986 times)
