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Greetings from Canada!
July 14th: Drive from NJ to NY. Uneventful.
July 15th: Drive from NY to ON. No US customs. Half-hour traffic jam getting to Canadian customs. The border guard doesn't like our story and sends us to Immigration. The immigration officer doesn't like our story at all—apparently it is unheard of to enter Canada with a Permanent Resident visa authorized but not yet issued. The officer is able to confirm that we applied for a visa back in 2005, but can't confirm that it has actually been approved and is ready for issue. He would have preferred that we had brought along proof of $10,000 in settlement funds. In his opinion, buying a house before landing is "putting the cart before the horse". Unlike everyone else I've ever talked to, he says that one could land-as-an-immigrant without presenting an Inventory Of Goods to Follow, then send that in later—but visas are not issued on Sundays so we can't do it now. After all this carping (we spend at least fifteen minutes at Immigration), he decides to let us in anyway(‼‼), apparently just to avoid ruining our day. What a nice country! But, since our story couldn't be confirmed, he sends us to Customs to have our car searched. The customs inspector looks through everything but makes no complaints. And now we're in!
July 16th: Kitchener Ontario. Um, Toto, we aren't in Kingston anymore. Speed limits here are treated as suggestions. The local accent is very slight. Many businesses are US chains. Entire minutes can go by without any indication that I'm in Canada and not the States. Caffeine is very popular here—people are hustling along, trying to get ahead. I can sort of see why Bitch, PhD might have hated this area so much (while working as a tenure-track professor of English) that she wrote a blog for two years in which she pretended to be in the US Midwest. Toyota has an auto-assembly plant in Cambridge ON, a little to the Southwest. Detroit is two hours's drive from here.
We spend four hours with the Realtor whom we had contacted two weeks ago. He tells us that everything in our price range is either a dump, in a red-light district, or is semi-detached. We drive around looking at semi-detached things, but Wifey just can't bear to move "down" from our current house to one that shares a wall with one neighbour and half a driveway with another. I tell her that people who didn't leave Germany in the 1930's, because they didn't want to lose social status, later ended up dead, but it's just no good. The Realtor is a country boy, age 57, who got into real estate after selling his cheese factory 30 years ago. He lives in the village next to the one he grew up in (they've since been amalgamated into the same township).
The Realty office also has a mortgage broker. The news from the broker is excellent! The "Welcome to Canada Program for New Immigrants with 35% Down Payment" means I can borrow money on my new house, with interest-only payments, at a more favorable rate than what I've got on the old house. What a nice country! I'd been assuming that I had to pay cash. Today I'll look at houses costing about $30,000 more, where there's much better selection. If that doesn't work, I suppose I could even go a little higher, although I still have no job lined up.
I don't like Kitchener, which is very blue-collar. And its "twin city" Waterloo is too upper-crust, with nothing whatsoever in my price range. So I expect that I'll probably buy something in the township of Wilmot.
July 15th: Drive from NY to ON. No US customs. Half-hour traffic jam getting to Canadian customs. The border guard doesn't like our story and sends us to Immigration. The immigration officer doesn't like our story at all—apparently it is unheard of to enter Canada with a Permanent Resident visa authorized but not yet issued. The officer is able to confirm that we applied for a visa back in 2005, but can't confirm that it has actually been approved and is ready for issue. He would have preferred that we had brought along proof of $10,000 in settlement funds. In his opinion, buying a house before landing is "putting the cart before the horse". Unlike everyone else I've ever talked to, he says that one could land-as-an-immigrant without presenting an Inventory Of Goods to Follow, then send that in later—but visas are not issued on Sundays so we can't do it now. After all this carping (we spend at least fifteen minutes at Immigration), he decides to let us in anyway(‼‼), apparently just to avoid ruining our day. What a nice country! But, since our story couldn't be confirmed, he sends us to Customs to have our car searched. The customs inspector looks through everything but makes no complaints. And now we're in!
July 16th: Kitchener Ontario. Um, Toto, we aren't in Kingston anymore. Speed limits here are treated as suggestions. The local accent is very slight. Many businesses are US chains. Entire minutes can go by without any indication that I'm in Canada and not the States. Caffeine is very popular here—people are hustling along, trying to get ahead. I can sort of see why Bitch, PhD might have hated this area so much (while working as a tenure-track professor of English) that she wrote a blog for two years in which she pretended to be in the US Midwest. Toyota has an auto-assembly plant in Cambridge ON, a little to the Southwest. Detroit is two hours's drive from here.
We spend four hours with the Realtor whom we had contacted two weeks ago. He tells us that everything in our price range is either a dump, in a red-light district, or is semi-detached. We drive around looking at semi-detached things, but Wifey just can't bear to move "down" from our current house to one that shares a wall with one neighbour and half a driveway with another. I tell her that people who didn't leave Germany in the 1930's, because they didn't want to lose social status, later ended up dead, but it's just no good. The Realtor is a country boy, age 57, who got into real estate after selling his cheese factory 30 years ago. He lives in the village next to the one he grew up in (they've since been amalgamated into the same township).
The Realty office also has a mortgage broker. The news from the broker is excellent! The "Welcome to Canada Program for New Immigrants with 35% Down Payment" means I can borrow money on my new house, with interest-only payments, at a more favorable rate than what I've got on the old house. What a nice country! I'd been assuming that I had to pay cash. Today I'll look at houses costing about $30,000 more, where there's much better selection. If that doesn't work, I suppose I could even go a little higher, although I still have no job lined up.
I don't like Kitchener, which is very blue-collar. And its "twin city" Waterloo is too upper-crust, with nothing whatsoever in my price range. So I expect that I'll probably buy something in the township of Wilmot.