A year ago today I entered this country, so I thought today might be good day to blog about the experience since at the time, I did not have a blog, and I was in no state to even comment on the process.

A year ago, about this time of day, I was viewing the fantastic beauty of Niagara Falls, but I wasn't as impressed with the spectacle as I think I might have been in a different situation since I was very focused on the big step we were going to take in crossing the border. While I've crossed the Canada-U.S. border many times as a tourist, this would be the first time I had taken a more permanent (yet still of course temporary) step of crossing with the purpose of living here for four or five years. And I was nervous about whether we had all the proper papers etc. Part of that nervousness no doubt had to do with the fact that the reason we had the time to view the falls, and do all the touristy things people do in Niagara, was because we were waiting that morning for our visas to arrive by fedex at the B&B we had stayed at the night before. We were cutting it close! We had also heard horror stories about trucks being ripped apart (I had a complete and extensive inventory of every box inside ours), and of course I was moving with my children, who although I have sole custody, were still going to be leaving one parent behind, and I wasn't sure if that would be a problem. It wasn't at that time, but the next time we went home for a visit, the agent at the New Brunswick/Maine border had a problem with us all having different last names.

Come to think of it, the last time I needed a visa to travel, we did much the same kind of waiting thing. When my family went to Brasil in the seventies, we spent three or four days in a Toronto hotel room waiting for visas from the consulate and hopped on a plane pretty much as soon as we got them (that was a long flight - Toronto to Rio!). Another similarity that hadn't ocurred to me till now was that we arrived in Sao Paulo the night before my dad had to go to work. We arrived in the Boston area the day before Dwayne started classes too.

By the end of the afternoon a year ago, we had waited and been cleared by the INS office and were on our way through upstate New York. We camped along the highway that night, and the next day, I spent much of it on the phone calling places whose ads I had downloaded from craigslist at the public library in Niagara the day before. I drove and dialled while Sandy read out phone numbers and wrote down answers and/or directions. I soon realized what the housing market was like as we drove since many of the places that had advertised the day before, were already taken by the time I was calling the next day. And I imagine the 403 area code of my cell phone put off most of the others who I left messages for. By the time we arrive in Eastern Mass late afternoon of the 31st, we were down to two places - the one we just moved out of, and one out in another community that the landlord said had someone looking at it that evening. Knowing the communities a bit better now, I'm glad we didn't even bother looking at the other place - not only did they likely rent it that night, but it also isn't a great area to live in.

We arrived in Watertown around 5 pm having gotten directions from the landlord, and pieced together those directions with the map. [Rush hour is never a good time to drive a moving truck in an unfamiliar city that has incredibly narrow streets!] We looked at the place, went to the local mall to look for a paper or additional ads, drove back, told them we'd like to take it, pulled out our references, credit report, traveller's cheques, and when they said it all looked good, asked them if we could bunk there for the night (even though the 1st wasn't till the next day). At the time, my predominant feeling was exhaustion and stress, but now that I look back, it must have seemed amusing to the landlord with these crazy Canadians showing up with a moving van full of stuff and landing on their doorstep. He tells me that he loves telling the story of how we, their first tenants (they had just bought the building a couple of months before) arrived. Now that those bad days are over, I enjoy telling the story of how we arrived too, dialing up potential landlords saying 'I'll arrive in town in about three hours, can I come and see the apartment then?' , but it didn't seem funny at the time.

A lot has happened since then, and I can say that I now, finally, feel (mostly) comfortable here.