Gray C

Hi

Would be interested in hearing from anyone that moved to Canada a few months ago to hear their views as to how their move has gone and whether they have any regrets, concerns etc

Have you made the transition to Canadian way of life?
Any regrets about the province you chose?
Have you managed to secure work, and if so how hard a task was it?
Is coping with the Canadian weather harder than you thought?
Is there anything that you should have bought with you and didn't, or visa versa?
Are you getting homesick?

Finally, for those of us who are still stuck in the UK, do you have any suggestions/advice to offer, and given the chance would you have done anything differently during or prior to your move?

wensamjam

Hi Gray C,

We moved to NS in July, and don't have any regrets now. When we first moved here it was hard, as we lived with family and the house sale in Uk fell through, so for the first 4 to 5 months it was still very stressful for us. Now we live in our new house in an area we love.
No regrets about NS, we think we made the right choice for us. Only downful we both have said are the wages, they are really not good compared to Uk.
Hubby, came into a job here, (truck driving,) didn't enjoy the work. I looked on internet and phone book for some contacts at the Airport, and within a day he had had an interview, and by the end of the week had a new job to start on Jan 3rd, which he is now really enjoying, has taken a slight pay cut, but it's not bad. I found work also as soon as I started looking, work as preschool teacher, which again is very under paid, if I can get into schools this year I will be happier.
AS for coping with the weather, hasn' t been a problem yet, we have spent hours digging out one weekend, but hasn't stopped us getting to work yet.
Don't regret not bringing anything, only miss our dog, that died just before coming out, but we are thinking of getting a new puppy in the spring.
We are now settling well into life here, but has not been easy, if we new we were going to have so much stress in our lifes for nearly 3 years then maybe we wouldn't of done it, so glad we did. The best move we have made in our lives for us and my 5 year old son.
What we would of done different in UK prior to our move was live our lives. You don't do anything, because you think you may miss something coming in the post, a phone call from immigration, stupid things like that. We should of continued to go away to Europe on holiday, but you think you need to save money for your rec trip or that would pay for your flight to Canada. So I would say to those in UK just beginning the process still get on with your lives and stop watching the postman.!! I know it's hard and easy to say now we have done it and got here, good luck to everyone still waiting. You will get there.

R2D2

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Hi
A very mixed response from this camp. We have been here since May. Chose Alberta as it gave us the best opportunity to secure a job beforehand as hubbys work conected to the Oil and Gas industry, and we knew we wanted to be near the Rockies, and we 'needed' access to them LOTS.
He got a good job ready to begin 2 weeks after landing, in those 2 weeks we had bought 2 cars and our lovely home in Sherwood Park after much trawling around looking at the different areas. So far everything was going smoothly Apart from the way my hubby felt. He was very emotional for the first week or so, contemplating what we had done, was everything going to be OK. I think the enormity of it all and all the goodbyes we had just been through hit him like a ton of bricks. Plus the fact the rental property we picked, was not where we wanted to be. I could look ahead and look forward, but he seemed unable too and I spent all my time trying to rationalise everything in his mind.
Anyway, time has gone on and he loves his work, we love where we live now, 5 yr old settled into a wonderful school, we are all making friends and feel we have fallen into a great community.
Coming from small towns in the UK, we thought thats what we wanted here too, but small towns here are way too 'hickey' for our liking so we chose nearer to the city. And Sherwood Park is fantastic, but hubby works in the city itself and that presents us with his next issue. He is most definately NOT a city person and hates driving through the 'dumpy' light industry outskirts of Edm that his route takes him. Because of this he has a bit of a downer on Edmonton, but as I keep telling him, all cities have this and the centre of Edm and the river valley is lovely, but he judges it all on the 'bit' he sees everyday.
I think he just wants to live in the heart of the Rockies, but thats just not practical.
We both find Alberta a bit flat, and at the moment too 'brown', so that makes us miss Englands green green grass all the more, but having said that we don't miss the rain that makes it that way. We think the last time it rained here was Oct 1st the day the MIL arrived.
On the whole we are happy here as we are all together, and are having a fantastic time going off into the mountains whenever we have a long weekend, seeing some of the most wonderful natural sights in the world. We are both more relaxed, have more time together, have more to show for our years of hard work. The kids are happy, we like the climate (not seen a harsh winter yet)
But we miss 'home'. We miss familiarity, and our friends and family. We are still in the period of adjustment and I know I am more settled than the other half. He asked me if I would be prepared to try another part of Canada if he really couldn't settle into our part of Alberta....................I don't know. I like it here, we are making friends, I just want time to put down our roots and make it 'home', but not at the expense of his unhappiness at SOME aspects of life here. And i also don't want to uproot the kids again just to 'try' somewhere else, only to find that that place may not be quite right either.
He has agreed to not analyse everything and just relax into life here and see if the waves of homesickness subside. It helps to not look at this as forever, but NEITHER of us can imagine going back to England either. We are going to do the 3 years then apply for citizenship, and the just see how we feel.
As i have said in previous posts, you can and should research as much as you can, but nothing can prepare you for the mixture of feelings and emotions that you can come across. All we can do is go with the flow, make the most of our time here, do all the things we wanted to do and just live the life we dreamed of.................hopefully given time it will ALL click into place.

JoD

Hi. I've been in Cananda since June last year with hubbie and daughter and we are beginning to find things difficult. Canada is a beautiful country and we have a lovely detached house in a nice neighbourhood that we could never afford back home. My hubbie managed to find a job without too much hassle, although he has had to take a pay cut and I stay at home with the little one. There is a very big car culture here and with us only being able to afford to run 1 car which my hubbie uses for work, means I'm stuck in the house alot of the time and most things are not within walking distance (although there is a bus service).

We have found that although Canadians are very polite and the children better behaved, we are finding the transition difficult. It is very work orientated and we hardly see anyone from week to week and are feeling lonely and isolated. We are thinking of moving back to the UK, but if we do we won't have any regrets about coming here. If anything, it has made us realise what sort of people we are - we need our families around us.

To those of you still waiting to emigrate I would say, just like what was said previously, live your life - enjoy you last few months with friends and family and enjoy the UK/European country. My only other advice would be to try to bring everything you can with you. We threw out or gave away alot of stuff that we could have used here without thinking - Christmas trees and decorations, kitchen utensils etc.

Good luck to all of you.

britishvixen21

Ive been here 3 years now, and only now am i starting to think of Canada as 'Home'. it takes a good couple of years to settle in make friends and find a place that you like and want to come home to every night.

The culture here is very different and the weather so much different. but you have to work through the homesickness. its hard very very very hard to work through that horrible feeling in your chest and the watering of the eyes every time you see something from back home. But its worth the hardship if you can stick it out.

For the longest time everytime i felt lonely or something happened to distrupt daily life i would say thats it were going back home, but if you give yourself another month to mull it over you get back into the swing of Canadian life.

I realised the other day that i hadnt thought about going home in over six months i realised then that i couldnt go back home i love it here too much. and trust me the thoughts of going home were a monthly occurence usually around the time "aunt Flo' paid a visit LOL.

My advice - Stick it out, rome wasnt built in a day and you cannot expect to move 3000 miles to a tottally different country and expect everything to be hunky dory after six months. its worth the hassle trust me.

Biiiiink

Not sure what that way of life is but we're doing things pretty much the same way we did them before.

Absolutely none. Well, being closer to a bigger airport/large US city for travel would be better but that's only an issue once or twice a year.

Housing is cheap, car insurance is reasonable, the white sand dune beaches are superb.

Neither of has looked. There are plenty jobs in the paper but obviously we haven't applied for any so don't know how it would pan out in reality.

No but it's been unseasonably warm. Not sure what my answer would be if this had been a typical winter. Summer was lovely but I wouldn't have liked to be without air conditioning.

I'm glad we brought our bed. There's a lot of bed disposing goes on here but if you read the measurements (I think 4 inches difference for ours?) and buy fitted instead of flat sheets, it isn't a problem.


No, I went to boarding school at 7 I did feel particularly bad for the set of grandparents who couldn't visit us due to ill-health. Luckily I could combine a trip to fetch the dog with visiting them, so they could see their grandson. If we'd been working, that may not have been possible

It was all pretty smooth actually. I spent ages doing a large hardback notebook that contained a numbered indexed page for every aspect of the move I could think of - from cancelling UK things to what we'd need as hand luggage to contact numbers for registering for healthcare etc. It's worth remembering you probably won't have an internet connection in your early days in Canada and take a note of the things you'd look up on the web. I stapled relevant information and business cards into the pages, kept it close to hand for months before (and after) moving so I could jot down thoughts about various things we'd need to do etc.

Mr B laughed his head off at this level of obsessiveness but I really do think it ensured we didn't forget things, pack important documents in the container and so on, and the move was as smooth as possible.

yonk

This is a good idea - I use the net so much I feel lost without it & it's only when you are away, you realise how much your own computer has things set up for you, cookies etc to get into websites.

Snave

We've been here since late April - it was a return home for Mrs. Snave. I'd been out here on several one-week trips. I don't think I miss much from the UK. Of course, I miss seeing Mum, my sister and my son, and various friends (all of whom want to use us as a base for skiing). But I don't miss the country of the UK. If I could do it again - I would without a doubt or hesitation. The one thing I would have done if I could do it all again would be to sell the UK house instead of trying to let it - read my other postings about that (including today's).
We're going through buying a house out here (we're renting at the moment). The house we're buying is a real fixer-upper - when it's finished I will think of it as home.

h_henry

I agree with R2D2 about the brown-ness of Alberta. As much as I enjoyed being in Canada when we did a recce of the Alberta Rockies, Okanagan etc. I too was struck by how brown and parched a lot of places looked. It made me realise that I need to live somewhere with more rain or else I'll miss the green hills of England too much. Another reason why we're looking at Nova Scotia!

pkc

We moved to Calgary just over 7 months ago, and are more fortunate than most, because it was moving home for me and so we had family to help with settling etc. It is new for Phil, though, but the adjustment has been good so far. Actually, he didn't really think there was much of an adjustment to go through because the language and so much of the culture is the same (doubtless he's in the minority on that!) What he has really missed is a good pint and decent newspaper, especially on the weekend.
Things to do differently - he started work 72 hours after arriving, which was definitely too soon. It was great to have a job to come over for (obtained through knocking on tons of doors, literally, resume in hand) but we needed a longer time to get settled. Don't underestimate all the fiddly little things that need to be set up!
No regrets at all and no homesickness at this point, but then we have 3 different lots of his family coming over for three different holidays next year! A key thing for settling seems to be to really have clear in your head why you're coming over and settling in a particular city, and whether your expectations are realistic or not. Britain sucks and Canada rules and we want a better quality of life is actually pretty vague. Everything that Brits complain about in Britain (healthcare, schools, crime etc) we Canadians also complain about! For us, we knew that less crowding and access to the great outdoors would be a huge plus and we knew that Calgary would give that to us.
Also realise that if you're coming over with the sale price of your home in hand, it will seem a lot cheaper at first but once you're settled and earning Canadian dollars there's not much in it.

R2D2

Hi Jo
Is there anything you can do to stop these feelings of isolation you have. Its very hard to be on your own in a new places with very few true friends and no Mum to fall back on. It has helped me loads as soon as my son started kindergarten in Sept. He just does half days and I take him and pick him up everyday, so I can meet up and chat to the other Mums and just get to know everyone. Is your child pre-school ? Do you get out to the park/ or pre-school groups ? on a regular basis so you are seeing the same faces week in week out.
Does your hubby need the car every day or could you rotate ? Can he share lifts with anyone or use public transport?

I guess I'm just thinking that if you could open things up for yourself you may suddenly look at being here in a different light.

I enroled my son in a playscheme between Sept and Xmas and the woman who was running the class was from Stockport. She got talking to me and told me that another English Mum she knew was moving onto my estate from another in Sherwood Park and did I want to be put in touch with her. Most definately YES was my response. The next day, she called me and we found out they were moving in to a house literally 3 doors down from me. Her youngest child is the same age as my youngest. Since then we pop round to eachothers for 'tea' every week, go to the park etc etc and we all went round to hers for Christmas drinks and nibbles which gave our hubby's chance to meet. I truly believe in fate and she was put there to help me.
Its nice to make Canadian friends, but really nice to have someone on totally the same wavelength to chat to.

oceanMDX

If it's green in the winter you want ... then the only areas to consider are the lower mainland of BC (Vancouver to Hope) and Vancouver Island - not Nova Scotia.

willmore

You dirty sneak you - stealing my cardinal!

h_henry

Ahh sorry to mislead - what I meant is that I would like green under the white stuff

oceanMDX

Still wrong... when the ground freezes, the grass dies and turns brown. In the spring the ground thaws and the grass greens up with the rain - same all the way from NS to Ontario. It just takes longer in the spring for things to green up in Alberta.