If you run out of room write on the back of this sh

Found item: Form IMM-5562 "Supplementary information - Your travels

List all trips you, and if applicable, your family members have taken outside your country of origin or of residence in the last ten years (or since your 18th birthday if this was less than ten years ago). Include all trips: tourism, business, training, etc. If you or your family member did not travel outside of your country during this period, check 'did not travel'"

Required only for those applying to the Paris office ie. Not Us. Thank god. Even if we could remember every trip we'd taken in the past five years (never mind 10) and even if we had more than four lines to write on, it would be none of their goddamn business.

One less thing

I handed in my thesis today. Yes, the thesis that I spontaneously decided to take on four years ago, thereby lengthening my stay here indefinitely; the thesis that has kept us here till now, as the last Thing To Do before we could move home. Not that I'm in any huge rush - I'm quite happy to enjoy the city thesis-free for a few months before leaving. Guilt-free afternoons on the terassi? No, kyllä!

Give it away, give it away, give it away now

Since Mr. O is currently in the process of cataloguing and selling hundreds of old records (I mean those dusty crates from 1994 that are all labelled "DJ Kashmir" that he thought he'd be giving to his children as an inheritance) I am playing fair and going through my books. I figure four boxes of books (160 pounds worth) is a bit much to ship home *whimper* as much as I hate to get rid of anything. I have amassed a lovely collection of vintage paperbacks (Penguin oranges, Faber and Faber classics) from used book stores in Amsterdam, Stratford, and yes, Toronto, that I smuggled onto my cheap IKEA bookshelf here over the years, and I'm not going to part with those, so many of my Elizabeth Bishop critical works are going into a box in Grandma and Grandpa O's garage for now (thank you Bonnie Costello, University of Harvard Press; it's nothing personal) to be claimed at a later date. I'm also making a bit of wiggle room by dumping Don McKellar movies on VHS and by burning all of our DVDs onto a hard drive and selling the discs for super cheap. Moving is at present the driving factor in our digital shift...

But I'm not cheating my way through this, and I managed to clear out a whole box worth of books (*muffled sob*). I know you're all wondering: what am I giving away? A short list of sacrifices:

*Eudora Welty The Optimist's Daughter - standard Vintage paperback bought at a flea market for 50 cents
*Finland - The Northern Experience, New Europe and the Next Millenium
*Carol Shields' Jane Austen bio
*An extra copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
*Jamaica Kincaid Annie John -- Postcolonial 101 but a hideous edition
*Pietro Aretino The School of Whoredom -- Ill-chosen book club casualty
*Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
*A Discovery guide to Mauritius
*A cheap edition of Dorian Gray
*The Rough Guide to Techno
* JM Coetzee's Youth (I'm wavering on this one, it was a gift)
*The Paris Review # 177 (with Shakespeare and co. stamp)
*Confessions of an Opium Eater (you would think it's interesting but it's kind of not)
*A Taschen mini coffee table book on Berlin interiors
*Simone de Beauvoir Today (today being 1982)
*Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld (I love East-coast girls with boy names)
*A lovely looking book called Monsoon Diary that Mr. O gave me and I never read
*The Writing Life by Annie Dillard that I think I "borrowed" from Kali
*A falling-apart Penguin Vanity Fair
*A falling-apart Penguin Ovid's Erotic Poems that was found inexplicably amongst digital marketing textbooks at my former workplace that I thought I could give a good home...I was wrong
*The United Arab Emirates Yearbook 2003
*MG Vassanji's The In-between World of Vikram Lall in hardcover (apologies to Morgan)
*Anthony Bourdain in Finnish translation Kobraa Lautasella
*A free chapbook from a Kiasma exhibit

Okay, so maybe not a sacrifice after all, but a much-needed spring cull. It's Round 2 that will be the bitch...

Who you callin' immigrant?!

After I posted a link to this blog on Facebook (an addiction from which I am slowly recovering) I got a few short notes on my wall from friends also dwelling in foreign lands. It might sound odd to some but, having lived in Helsinki now for as long as I lived in Toronto, and not having lived in my hometown outside Edmonton for more than 10 years, it is difficult to really say where I'm "from" any more. Add that to the mountain of paperwork involved in moving home with my foreign man and I start to feel like an immigrant to my own country.

True, I could come home any time I wanted, no questions asked, if I were alone. But since I'm not, coming home is actually rather complex -- and not just bureaucratically. Anyone who's ever lived abroad for any period of time knows how it feels to find yourself wholly out of context, without the family, friends, job, language, etc. that define you -- a definition that you don't even really realize until it's gone -- and what sort of task it is to rebuild your identity from the ground up. To use a violent metaphor, it's like growing a new skin. Until it's completed, you feel uncomfortable often and sometimes intensely so. I am an invisible minority here, since I look "typically Finnish" (ie. white, blonde) but, at least in the beginning, as soon as I opened my mouth my outside-ness was revealed. (Now I can hold off for 20 mins or so before running out of words.) I still don't read Hesari (although I do use the slang name for it) and I can't follow a lot of politics because the vocabulary is still inscrutable to me. But I can follow a conversation among friends and I've lost all fear of making an ass of myself in public - one of the 12 steps for any adult language learner.

Now coming back, I expect that both Mr. O and I will go through the same process all over again; definitely for Mr. O, who has spent time in TO but never lived there, but also for me, if in a muted measure. I wonder how Toronto will feel, old and new again, what neighborhood will appeal to us now, in 2007, compared to where I liked to hang out as a 21-year-old in 2000. The last few times we visited I was flushing mad to lose my bearings in TTC stations and even on Bloor Street -- humiliating for a girl who took pride in knowing all the best bike lanes (all the way down St. George -- no lights!) and afterhours on offer in the late 90s. And I know my immigrant experience here has certainly changed my outlook on how nationality and language as well as appearance influence identity. My husband has a name mostly unpronounceable by English-speakers, and if and when we ever have kids their names will likely strike some kind of compromise between the vowel-heavy phonetics of Finnish and the wooden Anglo tongue. Does that make me an immigrant? When do you start belonging to the place where you live, and stop belonging to the place where you were born?

The good news, part 1

Since Toronto is crawling with cute new media boys in dark-rimmed glasses like Mr. O, the chances of getting a labour market opinion (LMO) in his field were pretty much nil. We sat about listing off his "special skills," most of which were not marketable (ahem), and ended up with the most obvious, language. When I moved to Finland, my so-called special skill was native-language journalism and writing skills in the international business language (oh, barf) -- something that pretty much every single friend of mine in Toronto possessed. Seeing as the demand for native Finnish language writing in Canada is pretty low, Mr. O was very lucky to find a translation gig at an agency specializing in Scandinavian and Baltic languages. The pay is um, about half what he makes here, but advertising is hugely overpaid everywhere. Translators, on the other hand, are one of the few species of keyboard monkey which are underappreciated even more than your average freelance magazine journalist. And having taken a translation course or two during my time here, their job is anything but easy.

But I digress. The point is, Mr. O has scored himself a J-O-B. After rocking the standard exam like it wund't no thang, we heard back a few weeks later that they were adding his name to a list of lucky winners, and then a few weeks ago we heard back that the LMO had been accepted, and Mr. O could proceed with the application for a temporary work permit. This is the biggest milestone we've passed so far, as (assuming the app is accepted, knock knock) it means that he will be able to enter the country with me and work instead of posing as a tourist. And the money will cover basic expenses instead of taking from our savings. Aw yeah, we be cruisin'!

The bad news, part 2

Fun with budgeting:

The Canadian government requires that all people moving to Canada have 10,000 dollars saved, to cover the cost of living for the first three months. The actual cost of moving is almost that amount again. Here's our budget:

Moving bodies:
'Two one-way tickets Hki-TO: 918 EUR (1402.07 CAD)
Weight permitted: 23 kg each; 100 EUR for each extra 10 kg (on flights of 8 hours or more)
TOTAL: 1,402.07

Moving boxes:
*By Finnish post (by far the cheapest option if you're not shipping furniture or other big items)
one box (max 30 kg; 150 x 35 x 20 cm) to Toronto by ground mail: EUR 103.30 (CAD 157.71)
x 10 boxes: EUR 1033 (CAD 1577.51)
TOTAL: 1,577.51

Paperwork:
*Application to sponsor: 75 CAD
*Application to immigrate: 475 CAD
*Right of permanent residence fee: 490 CAD
*Medical exam (in Finland): approx. 100 CAD
*Document translations: approx. 225 CAD
*Temporary work permit fee: 150 CAD + 20 EUR (30.50 CAD) for bank cheque
TOTAL: 1,535

Setting up in TO:
*Rent deposit and first 4 months in a flat downtown (ie. somewhere between High Park and the Danforth), utils incl.: 1200 CAD x 4 = 4800 CAD
*Web connection: 80 CAD/ month + any set up fee = approx 360 CAD
*Two cell phone contracts: approx 40 CAD per month per person = approx 360 CAD
*Food, transport, et cetera: 750 per month x 4 months = 3000 CAD
*Furniture (bed, table, chairs, couch, bookshelves, lights - all vintage/second hand): 3000 CAD
TOTAL: 11,520

GRAND TOTAL: 17,434 CAD

The bad news, part 1

Fun with information retrieval:

Looking for information to decide on how best to move? The criteria for being called to an interview in London? The first-hand sources are thin on the ground.

The Canadian uh, "consulate" in Helsinki doesn't deal with immigration, visas, or citizenship. All apps have to go through the High Commission in London, which is also where any in-person interviews take place. We're not exactly sure what the consulate does exactly, because we can't peek through the welcoming blind they keep down over the reception window, although they did write me a very nice letter last year when I won a grant from the university. They also provide replacement passports that are not machine readable, and thus are guaranteed to make border guards grouchy, for the same price as a regular passport.

BTW, the CIC Call Centre number only works from within Canada. At the CHC London site you can fill out a form, and they get back to you relatively quickly. But chances of speaking to a live person are pretty much nil. In Finland residence permits are handled through the police, and I have awakened before light several times to take the train out to the suburban station to take a number (which is also incidentally where those not accepted are held before being deported), but at least, after waiting an hour or two, you get to talk to a human, face to face, who will usually tell you in a gruff police-person voice if you are wasting your time or not. Small-nation luxuries like this make Canada seem ginormous.

This means that an immigration lawyer is pretty much your only hope for a bit of common-sense advice on your individual situation, rather than a regurgitation of the legally-bound-to-be-vague details on the CIC site. The lawyer we called was very nice and talked to us for half an hour free of charge.

First things first

The best plans are those that can be changed. Our plan has changed several times as our knowledge-ignorance ratio shifts, but there have always been a few things that Mr. O and I have insisted on: We fly together, arrive together, and find a flat together. It sounds corny but we both thought this was very important.

And that was pretty much the whole plan at first: move there, get a flat, kill time while waiting for the in-Canada sponsorship. How hard could it be? We were married, after all. We thought we'd save up and Mr. O would be a tourist for the first six months (poor baby) while I played the good sponsor and got a staff job. To be eligible to sponsor your spouse or common-law/conjugal partner you need to have a Canadian address (or a job offer from a Canadian employer, or some other "proof" like an acceptance to a Cdn university) otherwise we would have started the actual application process from here in Helsinki. We thought moving there first and then applying would be more convenient, as we could go on our own schedule rather than waiting for papers in Finland. The whole thing couldn't take more than six months, tops.

When we actually talked to an immigration lawyer we confirmed that if we wanted to move together and apply from in Canada, Mr. O would have to come into Canada as a tourist, which meant
a) no working, as we already knew
and b) he had to have some kind of proof, like a return ticket, that he would leave when his visa expired.

The three-month visa would run out long before our application was processed. So Mr. O's choices were suddenly
a) a year in Canada without a job
or b) a return flight to Helsinki, alone, where a job and a random furnished flat awaited. Work for three months, come back for Xmas (another ticket), and then hope that the application processed before the next visa expired.

Unless he could find a job in Canada, the nice lawyer said, his best bet was b, as overseas processing times were only six months, compared to 9 or more. This is, to my knowledge, the fastest way to immigrate to Canada: spousal family overseas application, ready for you in just 182.5 days. Best case scenario: we'll take your money and you pay rent in two cities and live apart for six months.

That is a long time to sleep alone, you know? Of course, a lot of couples have no choice, and for others this is a reprieve from far more unhappy circumstances, but to us this felt like active discouragement. We got defensive, howling at each other about how we were educated, young, exactly the kind of people that Immigration ministers and people who consider the economy first would want to entice, blah blah blah. We ruthlessly compared the Finnish system to the Canadian, taking sides like in World Cup Hockey (FYI Canada takes in more immigrants every year than Finland has ever taken in, period.) After we wore ourselves out Mr. O was still disgusted, muttering about the Man under his breath, while I was trying to reconcile my desire to go home with my total apprehension at the risks involved. By the time we went to sleep that night I wasn't sure we were moving anywhere.

Last out of the gate...and yet

I have held off from starting a blog for so long, I'm almost blushing. I'm a late adopter to start with, and on top of that the kind who babbles on and then regrets it all afterwards. And I'll rework a sentence to death.

And yet here I am, a few years after the fact, jumping into the pool. This is more than anything a personal record of our strange adventure, moving home with my Finnish partner after six years abroad. You would think this would be a relatively simple thing. It's not. So I will also post any resources I find along the way that might be of use to anyone reading.

When I moved to Helsinki my fancy new employer handled the paperwork, it cost me nothing (or next to nothing) and it took two months. I figured I'd be here for a year, maybe two. The plan was to hang out and travel around Europe, maybe Asia. Long story short my boyfriend is now my husband, and we're thinking if we want to move back to Canada, it's sort of now or never. I'm getting comfy here in Helsinki, I love my friends, and we have good jobs etc. But Mr. O has always wanted to live in Toronto and I would also love to move back. It's been so long that I can't claim to know it the way I used to, and it will be interesting to see where we end up. I have all kinds of anxieties and at the same time big plans for starting over.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First we have to get there...and this is the reason I started this blog. While our "plan" all along has been to move back, neither of us really realized just what was involved in this - the amount of time, money, and patience. Canada is built on immigration and yet I wonder how many people living there have really experienced the fearsome foe that is the Canadian immigration bureaucracy. One look at the maze of vagaries on the CIC website is enough to discourage many potential new Canadians, I'm sure. Not to rag on public servants - it's obvious the system is overloaded - but the site is light on the kind of details that a good immigration lawyer will tell you for free. Our little case file (now just a zygote, really) will be one of many and relatively straightforward, no refugee claims or extended family members to consider. And yet we're looking at 9 months before Mr. O gets his permanent residence via in-country family class spousal sponsorship. Did I say daunting?