You can't go home again

Oh, my darling Toronto, I've been gone not six weeks and what has become of you? I returned last Thursday for a week to find my favourite bookstore gone, one of my most frequented restaurants trashed and burned, my former employer 1.5 publications and 20 people thinner, and my friends jumping at any sight of an unmarked van. Oh yeah, and then there was that earthquake...

That some of this was no surprise made the other bad news harder to bear. I found myself a tourist in my old town, naked without the bill-paying and other demands on my time that stymied me while a resident (still easier than wandering rootless in New York, where I am just a tourist with a local phone number). I would have felt better if I could have dropped in on Pivot for (not that) old times' sake, but they're off for the month. At least the Scream Literary Festival went off without a hitch, and that people are still drinking and fighting as ever. Next year I shall attend as a member of the paying public, and my liver will thank me.

The fundamental point here is that I loathe change, when I am not its agent. That cities are alive is what I love about them, and a bit of death and decay only makes room for new growth (if only the new wasn't so often in the form of branded collaborations and pre-fabricated real estate), and none of this would have been any easier to take had I been around to witness it firsthand. So maybe it's not the change, but the insult to my ego that my old room won't be preserved just as it was when I left it. Sniff.

Thanks to Jenny, Aaron, Elisabeth, Luke, Lindsay, Allison, Em et al for couches, hugs, frisbees, one-speeds, slow dances -- all salves to the scabby little wounds on my heart.

Degrees of separation

Repeated immigration is an effective way to mark the passage of time. I know exactly where I was and what I was doing in November, 2001, September, 2003, August, 2007, and so on, and gauge everything else by those markers -- including how long it's been since I, say, watched a Eurovision Song Contest live on television. Caught up like the rest of Finland in the worldwide phenomenon that was Lordi, I had even gone so far as to break my moratorium on freelancing (copywriting is overpaid and makes you lazy) and pitch the continental explosion of unabashed nationalistic fervour and bad taste to a magazine back home (they didn't bite).

So I'm ashamed to say that what with all the recent excitement, I entirely forgot about Euroviisut (as the Finns say) until I cracked open my copy of the New Yorker (shut up) this morning to find a fucking hilarious article on this year's contest by Anthony Lane. A taste:

"A deranged Estonian pianist smacked his keyboard with one raised fist, like a butcher flattening an escalope of veal. A pair of ice-white blondes, one with a squeezebox, decided to revive the moribund tradition of oompah-pah--or presumably, because they were Finnish, oom-päa-päa [sic]. A Belgian boy came on to croon 'Me and My Guitar,' otherwise known as 'Him and His Crippling Delusion....A smirking Serb of indeterminate gender, wearing a tailcoat, sang flat, hiccupping now and then for dramatic effect. Order was at first restored by Marcin Mrozinski, from Poland, who was backed by five demure women in national dress, and then destroyed as two of the women tore the white blouse off the third, to reveal a sort of peasant boob tube. An old Eurovision trick, this: the mid-song strip, timed to coincide with musical fatigue."

I could go on. Of course, Lane is British, and states this from the outset, because while people there feel about it much like I imagine Americans feel about, say, White Castle, a disgusting yet irresistible part of their national landscape, it is absolutely verboten for anybody outside the EU to diss Eurovision. All the same, the Brits are EV snobs, and, oh, never mind. The whole point of this (just typed "pint") is to say that I'm realizing how this move to the U.S. feels like I'm one step farther away from Finland, where, by the time I left, I'd spent as much time as in my precious Toronto. Adding to the uncanny effect is the media buyout of this (June 28) issue of the New Yorker by Canadian advertisers, to draw attention north to the G8, an event that is, IMHO, even more ridiculous than Eurovision.

One of the things people ask when they learn I lived in a foreign-speaking country for that long is, How is your Finnish these days? While based in sheer interest (or politesse), surely, for me it's a humiliating question: given that I have occasion to use Finnish outside Finland approximately once a year, when addressing Christmas cards to family there, "my Finnish" is suffering. I've resorted to carrying around my Finnish-English dictionaries, each of which weighs approximately as much as a two-year-old human child, from apartment to apartment as penance, in hopes of maybe coming across a word that needs translating.

Even Mr. O is losing the Finnish fever that attacked him so near-fatally in our first years in Toronto (to be fair, he did admit he would rather have made such a move as a younger man, before he was so set in his ways). Over the last few months, with New York on the horizon, he made overtures to our future return to Toronto, or Canada in general, a permanent settlement which he once in an argument accused me of holding behind my back like a secret plot or an ace of spades. I offered to put it in writing that such plot did not exist, and that Finland was certainly a first choice should we ever have kids that needed to be educated, for instance. I mean, who could deny a child such a cultural cornucopia as the lyrics to Latvia's 2010 entry "What For?":

I've asked my Uncle Joe
But he can't speak
Why does the wind still blow?
And blood still leaks?
So many questions now
With no reply
What for do people live until they die?
...
Only Mr. God knows why
(But) His phone today is out of range.

In closing I'd like to announce that Mr. O got his SSN card yesterday, which brings with it many happy things including a paycheck and a large dose of relief that somehow motivated me to start up this blog again after thinking about it for weeks. We're going to celebrate by getting blasted on vodka and eating meatballs and herring with a good Finnish friend at a Nordic restaurant tomorrow night, in honour of Juhannus or midsummer, an unforgettable Finnish holiday. Kippis.

Pieni maailma

For those of you who don't speak the world's tiniest language, that's "small world." Although, maybe you should start learning. The number of Finns or people with Finnish connections that I've come across in Toronto has been astounding. A short list:

-My dear friend C, who has Finnish heritage, and whose grandfather is in the process of getting his Finnish citizenship
-A colleague at work, who comes from Thunder Bay, aka Finnish-Canadian central, and has a funny story about how she pronounces her last name
-A lady at the bank, who actually lived in Sweden, but who can still count to five in Finnish
-Our friend T, who isn't Finnish at all but has been there - that's where we met him - and calls himself a Suomi fan
-My GP, who is Romanian but spent two years in Tampere, where Mr. O grew up, and can bust off a little suomea
-A girl in my yoga class who has a Finnish-Canadian husband who doesn't speak at all but who just got his EU passport
-A couple at the Art Bar who I pegged as Finns immediately
-Countless faceless but instantly recognizable names on hockey jerseys, TV show credits, message boards

I'm forgetting some, but these are the main ones. I think that's one of the great things about Toronto, you're always among people you know.

Even the CBC is getting in on the act with Finnish lessons. So now you have no excuse.

From sOHIP to nOHIP

I haven't posted in ages, but not for lack of things to be ungrateful about. Just as Mr. O was scheming ways to make the most of his time "off" and endear himself to the local industry (take on graphic and web design projects for free and hence legally without a permit, take a professional development course to get something local on his CV), the one-month culture shock kicked in – big time. Two weeks ago on our way to work Mr. O crashed his bike, doing a somersault over the handlebars and landing on his arm and head (with helmet, luckily). Acting on impulse (and knowledge of head injuries) I hauled him bleeding and dizzy into a cab to the emergency at the nearest hospital. We arrived to an empty waiting room, and a nurse who took his credit card information and had him sign forms before receiving any medical attention. Of course, our nOHIP doesn't kick in for three months from the time of application, which means some time at the end of November. In the meantime, we had assumed that our respective work insurance policies would cover any emergencies; nope, they also carry a three-month probationary clause. So Mr. O forked over 430$ for a three-and-a-half hour wait, a blood-pressure check, and a bandaid and headrub from a medical student. By the time I tracked him down on the phone he was ready to leave, not only from the pain (he had been given no painkiller and had seen no doctor), but also because the people who were already waiting before him had also not been treated, including one woman who started to cry, and because he hadn't had any food or water since arriving at the hospital.
I remember feeling rather haughty watching Morgan Spurlock trying to get basic medical treatment in the US (after all, Mr. O's injuries were non-life threatening) but I can do so no longer. The Canadian "social welfare" system is all but non-existent for new Canadians. For those of you who raise their eyebrows at my claims, try to imagine moving to a country with no police force. That's how it strikes someone coming from a functional social welfare system into Canada.
To be fair, we were warned to buy health insurance before coming to Canada. The main reason we didn't was because we thought our work insurance would cover us. At that point Mr. O already had the job, although had not yet laid eyes on his contract nor on his insurance policy – but he did know that there was one. It's surprising to me that a company that brings in foreign workers doesn't provide for their welfare once they arrive. It is also of note that we are paying taxes during this period, though for what, I've yet to see with my own eyes.
So this was Mr. O's entree into "culture shock." I talked to a fellow importer of foreign men (read: man) and she said her import was experiencing a similar tendency to hide away and just flat out hate this new place for a little while. As for me, I am only slightly better off, having shelled out another 450$, this time to Manulife, for "Visitors to Canada insurance" a variation on travel insurance designed for liminal folks like us. Word to the wise: get it before it gets you. This, and a verbal agreement with Mr. O that we are not committed to staying here for any length of time, is the compromise we've arrived at. The idea that we had made a mistake coming here at all crossed my mind for the first time.
After disappearing into our little house of a hole for a week or so (coming out for work and food only) we were feeling better. Mr. O has a scar in the shape of a guy driving a tractor on his left elbow, and a bruise the size of a field underneath. But he has also completed a rite of passage: he has tasted the wrath of Toronto's viciously slippery and cruel streetcar tracks, which means he is officially a Local Cyclist.

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?

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?