Hello all!

I decided to keep a brief account of my experience in Canada to date as blogs like this were what I found most helpful when I was looking into coming to Canada. I have already been here over two months now so I'll just summarize what my experience and what I've learned so far!

I came over from Ireland with my boyfriend and his cousin on 28.12 having made the decision to escape the incessant talk of the recession in Ireland! WE booked our Visas, Insurance and flights through USIT (The Irish version of BUNAC, SWAP, etc...) All in all you can expect to pay about €2,000 for all three give or take. The USIT programme has gone down this year by about €200 and as far as I am aware it is closed at this point for 2010 but the waitlist is open.

We said all our goodbyes etc (saying goodbye to my family was awful!) and flew from Dublin to meet our connecting flight in Heathrow. Our luggage went straight to Vancouver. We flew with BA. The flight was over 9 hours and there were no real issues.

We landed in Vancouver at about 7pm and made our phonecalls home; we'd been warned to call and let them know we'd arrived safely! When we stepped outside the airport the first thing I noticed was the smell in the air, a smell of pine, which I'll now always recognise as the smell of BC! We got the Skytrain from the airport to Waterfront Station. We had booked into the Cambie Hostel for a week which is just on the corner of Cambie and Cordova near Waterfront station. We retired our bags and went downstairs to spend some dollars in the bar. That's when we first realised how expensive beer is here! $6 for a bottle of heineken! It doesn't seem much when you're converting to euro but when you're earning Canadian dollars you'll feel the pinch!

The next day we just started to find our feet and familiarise ourselves with our surroundings. We wandered around the city for a while and tried to recover from the jetlag. The first thing on the agenda was to get Canadian numbers. If you don't have a quad band phone the cheapest option for you would probably be to by a sim-free phone. Most networks do them and they work out being the cheapest. If you're from Ireland, UK or Australia be prepared to spend more than you do at home on your phone bill/credit! You're charged for everything here! Voicemail, (To set up and to check!) incoming calls and even caller display! If your minutes run out during the month you have to buy more credit because you can no longer receive calls! The Network Provider you go for depends on what you think you need but definitely shop around and try go to a store like Best Buy. They are probably the cheapest and not biased towards any one Network.