My family picked up and moved from the DC area to the surroundings of Toronto last week, and we still have all our limbs intact! My wife and son are here as citizens, while I am a lowly visitor, at least until my immigration paperwork goes through.
We are in the so-called Greater Toronto Area (GTA), which means we are in the part of Canada that is not Montreal, Vancouver, or Toronto itself. That’s Greater-with-a-capital-G: it’s about a 90 minute drive to get downtown from here.
So far my experience as a Canadian resident is much the same as that as a US resident. One must just learn the proper mental substitutions: Comcast is now Rogers, Target is Zellers, Digiorno is Delissio, Nabisco is Mr. Christie, bathroom is washroom, miles are kilometers, degrees Fahrenheit are now degrees Celsius, Throwing Away Garbage is now Composting.
Things are expensive. A whole chicken costs $12, while it would be $7 at our previous place. And the Canadian dollar is more or less at parity with USD these days so that’s still real money. Albeit money that comes in various pretty colors and shiny coins.
We live near one “Taunton Road.” I can’t shake the image of the internal organs of Hothian beasts whenever I drive on this one.
Moving our 92 boxes worth of earthly goods (among them, over 600 books) turned out to be easier than we expected, apart from the two weeks of packing time. Customs took us about two hours in all. The movers delivered our stuff within a week. It will still be some time before various wrinkles, such as managing to receive snail mail, are ironed out, but hopefully before long this house we are renting will feel like home.
To our stateside friends, look us up if you happen this way. Our email addresses survived the move but not much else in the way of contact info.
Wow, nice! Don’t you miss Baltimore crabs!
I love to read the mental substitutions! Best of the luck with your Canadian life!