Friday 30 August 2013

Update:The Land of the Maple Leaf!



Hi,

A little/huge update! I have moved to Toronto, Canada!




I know it sounds a little crazy but I felt like I had serious 'itchy feet' at home, and as a quote I read recently said 'Life is for living not existing'. I felt really like I was just existing at home, I would go to work, come home, go to sleep, get up and do it all over again. It was not inspiring me, I was not achieving any goals that I had ever imagined for myself and I wasn't pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

So after a long few months of saving and not leaving the house for fear of spending money, my sister and I moved to Canada. Obviously we had applied for our visa's etc. back in January and had gotten them at this stage so we were off, heavily over-packed with one week booked in a hostel thinking we were starting a new life. And although it's great (we're only here two weeks) and I wouldn't change it and certainly would not go home, it's alot harder than I had imagined. I think I had my rose-tinted glasses on before we left and thought it would all be easy as pie, we'd get a house, jobs and have a great life in the warm summers and learn to ski/snow board in the Winter's. Now obviously this is all still possible its just slower than we had imagined.

Getting a house in Toronto without having a credit rating or a job currently is nearly impossible, unless you have family in Canada who can be your guarantor on the lease then you really have no hope. We really wanted to get set up with a house before we looked for jobs so we knew where we would be based and how far away jobs would be etc. but that's not going to happen. We saw loads of houses and applied for them and even showed statements of our savings to support ourselves for 6 months if needs be but no luck. This would all be fine if the Toronto Film Festival wasn't on and Labor Day is on Monday so all the hostels are basically booked out. Without wanting to impose too much on our friends over here, some of which we have basically only met, we are seriously out of pocket and out of patience with moving from one place to the next (bear in mind I did say we over-packed!). So now we have given up on house-hunting and are moving on to job-hunting which i hope for the life of me is better than the houses. Going on the reports of the people we have met already here from Ireland and the British Isles, both are as difficult as each other, most were at the very least 6 weeks without work or houses......you can see how you can get defeated easily!

Things are done very differently here so it takes some getting used to I guess, I'm hoping this will come with time when you understand the system.

But on the positive, the hostels we have stayed in are lovely, I highly recommend the Canadian and the HI Hostel Toronto. Both are very clean, accommodating and have lovely atmospheres. Also, all the people we have met so far have been so nice and friendly and I am happy to have been able to meet them. Toronto itself, I do like, we have experiened a few 'more dodgy' areas but thats to be expected in a big city, nothing different than Dublin. The only thing we have so far that we have been missing is Canadians! For the life of us and any of our friends who have been here much longer we cannot find any canadians, maybe they don't really go out at night, or maybe they are somewhere totally different than us, At the moment we seem to be mainly heading out in Downtown and maybe that's just not the place to be in Toronto!? Any suggestions about this would be much obliged, because as much as we love our fellow Irish, we could have seen them at home! We came to meet new people from different places!

Anyway, we are in the HI Hostel now for a night, then a friends couch for the weekend and back here on Monday, frantically job-hunting! We have done fun things too which I'll do posts on later, just thought a little introduction post was needed before I started rambling on about Toronto without explaining how I got here!

Much Love,


Rach

xx

2 comments:

  1. i went to canada last year, it was amazing!
    like your blog!
    could you check out mine please? would be an honour!
    Itsfashiondamnit
    Thankss!
    xxx

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was in Canada once, very beautiful country. Good for you!
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    ReplyDelete