Emma.Giles

Hi,

Has anyone read any books to do with emigrating or found many magazines/books that were helpful.

Thanks

Emma x

Oink

Ten pound Poms: Australia's invisible migrants. By A. James Hammerton & Alistair Thomson.

Makes for sobering reading and has many parallels with today.

Souvy

Could you be a tad more specific?

Oink

The Defector by Daniel Silva

Is not a bad read if you like a thriller.

iaink

Wasnt there a thread like this a while ago that concluded there is lots of fiction and tourist books out there, but any emmigrating books are out of date by the time they are published, or tend to apply only one point of view, which anyone whose spent any time on the forum here will know is simply not going to work for everyone.

Thats the great strength of the forums I think, its up to date and its lots of peoples point of view.

iaink

One of these threads..

http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=661135

http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=635141

Save everyone dragging out the same old joke titles and mentioning Anne of Green Gables

There are a few magasines out there, Muchmore is one of the better ones, but they often come over as very positive and optimistic to me.

dbd33

"How the Irish became White" by Noel Ignatiev.

While the specific context, Irish immigrants clawing their way up by grinding the Black population down, is specifically American, the broad picture applies, I think, well to Canada; society is non-inclusive of immigrants, success depends on finding some other group to subjugate. One must rub shoulders with the people newly arrived from the rest of the world but always be mindful that their success will be at the expense of ours. I offer the union at Hydro One, the meetings of which are now conducted in Cantonese, as an example of one immigrant group succeeding at the expense of another; the meetings were previously conducted in Scottish. Neither is intelligible to me and I am not, in any case a member, but I've been interested to see how slow the Scots were in realising that their jobs and status meant nothing to a newer and more aggressive wave of immigrants.

HPJOS

Wrong country I know but I thoroughly enjoyed "Driving Over Lemons" by Chris Stewart. They bought a run down farm in rural Spain - it was not exactly the same as moving to Canada but having done the move I can appreciate some of their emotions, especially when the baby came along!

The sequels are "A parrot in the Pepper Tree" and "The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society", also very good.

Helen

I should add I found this useful from the emotional point of view, being an outsider in a small community and the cultural adversities which one has to overcome in order to be accepted, nothing to do with the actual paperwork and immigration requirements.

dbd33

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient is not set in Canada, but the glacial pace of the book and the feeling it engenders that one would sooner die than suffer another on through another week of it, captures the spirit of Canada in the winter.

iaink

LOL, classic You really need to find something to do in the winter to make it less interminable. Ice fishing perhaps, I can just see you holed up in a hut on a lake with a mickey and and nice read

CanadaJimmy

Just my opinion, but I think you'd be better off researching the country you're moving to than the act of emigrating itself. I'll give you an example: as soon as I got here I went to the library here and loaned out the DVD set of "The Greatest Canadian" to learn about Canadian history.

With emigrating there's not really a lot to know, it's just going through the steps everyone talks about on here, whether it be filling in the forms or opening a bank account.

dbd33

I have, of course, tried ice fishing. Also snowboarding, removing snow bobbles from the dog's feet, digging a path through the snow to the barn, pulling out various stuck vehicles and standing for an hour with a hair dryer defrosting frozen hoses. None of it detracts from the dreariness of once again setting out in the dark to drive a long way through blowing snow, unable to see the way ahead, waiting for the inevitable day that some unlit vehicle will stopped in the road and the collision will put me out of my misery.