Clowns and witches hats

I knew it was going to be an odd day when I saw a clown on the way to work. I don't mean some idiot driving down the wrong side of the road but a real clown. Orange wig, baggy green trousers, full make up and those huge long flat shoes, calmy walking down 107th street clutching his coffee mug. Nobody paid him any attention, except me, amused not just by his nonchalance but by everybody else's indifference, as if clowns are a common sight in downtown Edmonton on an October day. Of course, today is not ordinary in North America dear reader - Oh no. Walking into reception at Stantec, I was cheerily greeted by a group of pink fairies in tutus pretending to be receptionists and the VP's personal assistant was wearing an orange robe and a large pointed orange and black witches hat. Halloween has hit town. As I write, my eldest daughter, Charleymunchkin is knocking on stranger's doors, demanding treats with menaces and dressed as a leopard. No doubt tales will be retold when she and my escorting wife return.

There was also a special 'Halloween Pot Luck' lunch where everyone bought something to eat and people just swapped food, in costume of course. Unfortunately, I couldn't attend as I was participating in a seminar about Alberta mapping although I did hoover up some left overs in the form of pumpkin shaped cookies and spooky looking sandwiches. They even had a special Halloween brew in the coffee franchise in reception. Now that takes me nicely into another great North American tradition - coffee.

You see, coffee in Canada isn't just a drink - it's a religion. From the moment I step out of the door in the morning for my 15 minute walk to the transit station, everyone is getting their first hit of the day. Queues form at every drive through coffee shop, burger joint and restaurant. People walk down the street with the familiar thermal coffee mug that everyone seems to carry and get on the bus with a cup of the steaming liquid already half drunk. The smell of coffee is everywhere, not least at Stantec, where it pervades through the office. There is always a pot brewing in every kitchen on every floor and there is always at least 3 types to choose from. Yes coffee is definitely king. I really must get myself one of those thermal mugs....

Not that skiing was the only reason we decided to emigrate to Canada. The prospect of a new and more stimulating job was also a good one. As was the education system, the lower cost of living, lower taxes, seasons, friendly people, plenty of outdoor pursuits, big houses, etc. That is only half the story however. As well as the reasons for coming here, there are also a number of reasons for we wanted out of the UK. The cost of living was undoubtedly crippling. Yes, we could have moved somewhere cheaper, but that meant finding another job and in the UK, being 50 WAS a big deal. Even then, prices were becoming more homogenous no matter where you moved. Then there was the traffic and the overcrowding, the prospect of even more people pouring onto this small island was not going to improve things. People are coming to Canada too, but the difference is, here there is space aplenty to accommodate them. One of my major concerns, perhaps the main one if I was honest, was the prospects for the children. The education system was struggling and standards falling, the job market was contracting even if you managed to get through university without a life time of debt and everything was just getting, well, harder....

The mist recedes.....

As first weeks at work go, it will not go down in history as the most memorable. Or maybe it will, as it was my first time that illness and uncertainty combined to provide an unusual baptism. Anyway, I'm fine now thanks for asking and back to full strength and fighting fitness. Apart from work, this last week has been fairly uneventful in matters pertaining to our ongoing foray into all things Canadian. I imagine our next real insight will be on Wednesday on Halloween, when things are schedule to go, well quite frankly, beserk. Charlotte, much to her joy, has found someone to go trick-or-treating with (the son of Shirley, our realtor and I'm pleased to say, friend). So now we need to get her costumed up and await the experience.

I thought I would bore you this time with my job. No, honestly, not the nuts and bolts, but the first impressions of employment in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. After all, a new job and all the challenges therein is one of the major reasons for coming here in the first place. But first, an overview. It certainly is different. The last firm I worked for in the UK consisted of about 12 office staff and a dog, and sometimes the dog was absent. The company I have now pledged my allegiance to has about 6500 staff in about 80 offices all over Canada and the US. They are called Stantec Consulting, I am employed as a senior civil engineer in the Power and Resources unit and more specifically, in the Transmission and Distribution department (T&D). You see, that is what I do. I design and build overhead power transmission lines that convey electricity from the generating stations to the end user, that's you, dear reader. It is very interesting work, no honestly, and Canada has a stack of it to do and I mean a stack. Thousands of kilometres of lines that need to be built, refurbished and upgraded and all in North America. With all this work in the future, Stantec have mobilised a vast resource and have set up T&D over the last year. The team so far consists of 10 people. Er, yes that's right - 10.

The team is made up of 3 electrical engineers, 1 project manager and 6 civil/structural engineers and what a United Nations it is. There is only 1 genuine Canadian and that is Stan, the boss. He hails from Vancouver Island and, in my short tenure so far, is a Top Bloke. Then there is Sandy from Sri Lanka, Tam from Korea, Eric from the PRC, Chris from Singapore, Philip from Hong Kong, John from Vietnam, Rolando from Malaysia and Phone-Har from Burma. It is almost as if Stantec have a 'no employing more than one person from the same country' policy. "Can't have that, they might get together and start forming gangs". Naturally, it isn't that at all and nationality just isn't important. Everyone seems to get along and all are very helpful - I think I'm going to like it here.

My first week, excluding the first 3 days when everything just passed me by in a blur of sickness, was pretty much taken up with finding my way around the labrythine office layout, learning how to operate the coffee maker and getting to grips with Stantec's impressive Intranet, policies, procedures and security pass system. Next week, they might even give me some work to do. My first task however, is to get up to speed with all the Canadian codes of practice and standards. I'm pretty useless until I can master those.

Well, more of this later. I'm going house-hunting now, just for a change.....

It was a sort of calm before the storm. The next issue to be addressed would be one of job-hunting for me. We had already decided that Claire would not work and we had been re-assured that me getting employment would be no problem. As it turned out, that was exactly true. We had also been told that ir was pointless looking until about 3 months before our application was due to be processed. That would be around December 2006. But I researched anyway, finding companies around Alberta that worked within in my field of expertise. One of our big reasons to emigrate was to improve our standard or living. That meant Claire not working and me earning enough in a good job to support all of us in a great house with money to spend on the important things in life - like skiing. Another reason why Canada was so attractive to us in the first place.

Poor timing.....

It seems that Murphy's Law is alive and well and also living in Canada. After a week of near faultless preparation for my new job, I go down with some ghastly stomach bug which poleaxes me over the weekend and quite frankly makes me feel like s*** for my first day at my new employer in a new city in a new country. Marvellous. I managed to stagger in on the St Albert transit and fend off waves of nausea and the biggest headache ever until tonight. So I will keep this short if it's all the same to you.

In summary then, new job, felt awful. Decided against the house in Grandin Park as we saw two stonking houses over the weekend. The two cats are OK. Max seems to be enjoying himself whereas Merlin will probably hate us forever. More about all this when I can sit at a desk for longer than 30 seconds...

....and then what happened next was nothing - for about 18 months. Well, actually there were one or two questions to be answered but fundamentally it all went very quiet. We continued to research and fact find but at a reduced level. We knew this was going to happen. Skilled worker applications for permanent residency were taking 2 years to process due to demand.

House Hunting

We had all actually been out to Canada before. Last May, the family, including my father-in-law, came out to Edmonton for a sort of fact finding/holiday/what-the-hell-are-we-doing sort of trip. As well as bit of sightseeing, the first week was planned to be a sortie into the murky depths of the Canadian housing market. Now, apart from Edmonton itself, the two main residential areas of note are Sherwood Park, a large and fundamentally new development to the South and East of the city and St.Albert, a city in itself to the North and West. You couldn't get two more diverse areas. Sherwood Park is a vast commuter new-build, full of white collar families and shopping malls and, as we discovered, very few trees and green areas. Claire hated it, so we turned our radar toward St. Albert. Now this was more like it. St Albert has what you would call, personality. There are huge areas of parkland, interconnecting communities with names like Deer Ridge, Braeside, Grandin and Forest Lawn amongst many. The properties are a mix of new and old, (OK short definition here, in the UK old meant 200 years. In Canada, a house is considered ancient if it was built in 1974) and some of them have quite large gardens (yards). The main problem is that a considerable number of them have yards the size of postage stamps and there is a propensity here to cover as much of what yard there is with decking. This has three benefits to the average Canadian. Firstly, they have somewhere to put the enormous barbeque, secondly somewhere to put the essential hot tub and finally more decking means less of that pesky gardening to do.

Thus we, an expat family, have a conundrum. We want a property with a large garden, but don't necessarily want to move outside St. Albert, we want a house with enough bedrooms but quite often the bedrooms are split between the main levels and the basement. Oh yes, all houses in Canada have a basement, not dank, dark, leaky old cellars, but fully furnished floors with bedrooms, bathrooms, games rooms, gyms, home cinemas (oh yeah baby), you name it. All new houses have basements which are unfinished, so you have the extra cost of developing it. Houses here also have double or triple attached garages, in which you could house a small private plane.

Anyway, back to our search. Yesterday was spent entirely house hunting with our friendly realtor (estate agent) Shirley - who has more than a passing resemblance to Dolly Parton, in all departments, but comes from Blackpool. We met her when we came out in May and kept in touch. All day in and out of houses went down like a lead balloon with Charleymunchkin, but we persevered. We were rewarded when we came across a great house in Grandin Park, with a large garden backing onto a park, in a quiet cul-de-sac and within walking distance of all amenities. We have been in touch with their realtor with a view to firing off an offer across her bows so watch this space.

The next task we must undertake is looking for a car, but that will be a different story.....

It wasn't because we had lost interest or cooled off after our initial excitement, but simply the fact that when faced with a mountain of paperwork and form filling, the human brain has a tendency to file it under pending and then undertake a more interesting task - like watching tv. Finally, we decided that the form filling elves were not coming so we had to start doing it ourselves. I'm not going to bore you with the details, suffice it to say that it took us about 9 months to produce a large wad of documents which we then sent to the immigration consultant for processing and putting together the submission to the Canadian Immigration Authorities. We then sent another slice of the fee and sat back and waited to see what happens next.....

That's another thing about jet lag, just as you think that things are beginning to stabilize, it turns around and slaps you smartly about the face. At 5.00am this morning, daughter no. 2 (Eleanor, aka wibbly pig)) decided enough sleep had been achieved and proceeded to terrorise what remained of the night. So I got up, was then relieved by Claire at 7.00 am and returned to bed until 9.00. Daughter no. 1 (Charlotte, aka charley munchkin) slept through until 7.00am though so maybe victory is in sight.

Meanwhile more stuff is being achieved. We spent two long hours in Service Canada to get our Social Insurance Numbers and another hour today getting a bank account. I contacted my new employer to confirm that a) I had landed and b) I still wanted to work for them. We also saw a house in the Northwest Acreages but more of that later...

The main achievement was finding a store that stocked stilton cheese. All I have to do now is to track down some Marmite and Canada will be mine...

One thing that has struck us at this time of year is the wholehearted embracing of Halloween. Not for Canada, the pathetic British attempt to put on a couple of cheap plastic masks or the sight of two bedraggled children trick or treating. Oh no, Canada does it BIG. You cannot move for pumpkins, large and small, full sized ghosts, ghouls, witches, spiders, you name it. There are severed limbs (artificial) to be purchased at garden centres, tombstones issuing forth green mist for your front yard and my particular favourite - a severed head with embedded meat cleaver which quivers and twitches when you switch it on. Marvellous. We took Charlotte to see a pumpkin display which involved every thing you can do to a pumpkin without being arrested and she loved it. Her favourite bit was the haunted garden shed, when you opened the door there was a splendid display of severed heads and a skull and attached spine dangling from the door. I read an amazing thing at this display. Pumpkins are Canada's fifth most produced vegetable and only 8% is used for food, the rest are used for 'recreation', otherwise known as scaring the s*** out of your neighbours. I'm sure there will be more surprises in store on the run up to Halloween and you will be the first to know.

Ah yes, the house we visited. Before we left the UK, we did a fair bit of property research over the 'net. We found this house a few weeks ago and it looked great. It was an acreage property. Now these are situated out of town, mostly to the North and West of St. Albert and include an acre or two of land. This house was a single level property (oh alright then - a bungalow) with a fully developed basement. It was huge but looked interesting so we arranged a viewing direct with the owners and trundled along to see it. Now I'm not going to go into too much of what you get for your money out here, I'll discuss that later, but this house didn't just need a family to live there, it needed an army of maids, gardeners and maintenance workers as well. It needed a whole lot of modernising, the basement needed completely renovating, I would need to get a second job just to furnish the place but the garden! It was over an acre and a half and came complete with it's own wild deer....We won't be buying it though, it would be too much like hard work just to hoover the place, oh and we can't afford it.

...After the meeting, Claire and I looked at each other and decided to go forward and start the process which would lead us to where we are today. We paid the first instalment of the 6000 quid it would eventually cost us and were given an assurance that the wheels had started turning as indeed they had. After a few days an enormous wad of documents arrived informing us of what we had to do next. It involved two things, filling out a lot of forms and providing a huge amount of information about everything ranging from copies of our 'O' level exam results to proof of our funding and employment. We read through the seemingly endless list of what was required, sat down, rolled up our sleeves and promptly did nothing about it for the next six months......

Jet lag is a weird thing. I hesitate to use the word 'funny' because it just isn't. It was 5am this morning when the brain was telling me that I need more sleep but the body clock was saying "come on, let's go!". The kids were better though, I managed until 6am before the sounds of activity from their room could no longer be ignored.

Yesterday was spent mainly in our basement apartment organising ourselves, making plans, surfing the internet for macho Canadian trucks and 4x4's. We also contacted the UK to let our families and friends know that we had, indeed, landed. Sadly, we do seem to have mislaid our digital camera - it is not in our hand luggage, I can't remember packing it at all and so now I'm going to have to produce this blog without photos at least for the time being. So bear with me, I will try to figure out a solution. (Like buying another one).

We also went to the St Albert branch of Safeways, my we do know how to live. Could not buy Crunchy Nut Cornflakes (minor disaster) and stilton cheese (major disaster). Now we are fully stocked, especially as I finished it off with a pack of Molson Canadian beer - or slightly tasteless water, as I would call it. Interesting side issue this actually. You can only buy alcohol at specific liquor stores, you cannot get it at petrol (gas) stations, supermarkets or Mahatma's local corner shop. However, they do have excellent cold rooms within these liquor stores so you buy your beer already ice cold - excellent.

We also went to see our two cats in absentia, Max and Merlin. They are currently ensconced in a kitty hotel just 10 minutes north of St. Albert, along with 27 other moggies. They are not happy. Merlin has been making it quite clear that he will truck no nonsense with the other inmates, sorry, guests and Max is just sulking. They are both well though and eating and they were pleased to see us. It will be a good few weeks before we can spring them as we will need a place of our own before moving them.

Today is not going to be fun. We have to go downtown to get our Social Insurance Numbers and then pick a bank to open an account. We may also have a cruise around the neighbourhood to check out the local amenities - Oh Joy.

It must have been about about 2003 when Claire and I first thought about going to Canada. We can't even remember what made us think to emigrate. The cost of living in the UK? A better life for our children? Or the ability to go skiing any time we jolly well please? I saw a flyer for an emigration exhibition being held in Sandown Park and went along. There were representatives from several countries present, immigration lawyers, PR people and the like. I got talking to a company called Willis Brazalot, immigration consultants and made an appointment for Claire and I to meet them to talk about this concept of emigrating.....

The Beginning

I'ts difficult to know where to begin.

Not only have we embarked on the most life changing adventure, this is the first ever post on my first ever blog - so everything's new.

I could start over four years ago when Claire and I first decided to emigrate to Canada, or two and a half years ago when we handed in our application for permanent residency. Or I could talk about the intervening period of form filling, information gathering, researching, job hunting, house selling, moving and of course, the emotional roller coaster that goes with telling your friends and your family, especially the families, that you are about to leave England for good, take the kids and start a new life in Alberta, Canada.

I'm not going to start at any of those points. There will be plenty of time to flashback to anything of significance. No, I'm going to start here.

It is 6am in the morning, Charlotte, our eldest, has jet-lag and has woken up Eleanor, our youngest. My wife Claire is asleep in one of the two bedrooms in this cosy basement apartment in St Albert, just north of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and I'm typing my first blog entry. Today is the second day since we arrived as landed immigrants and everything is new. They (or should I say we?) drive on the right, they don't sell Marmite in the supermarket, I couldn't find any channel on the tv that could show England rolling over the French in the rugby world cup, my mobile phone does not work and we have a million and one things to do....