Paperwork
I realize it’s naive to think that moving countries and setting up a new life could be paperwork free, but seriously! We’ve been a bit stupid with the paperwork really – since we were granted the work permits for Canada we’ve totally ignored any other possible documents we might need for our move. Applying for the work permits was not at all difficult since it was all done online, I had an employment offer and work in research and Joonas could apply for an open work permit, but we did need to compile a fairly large pile of documents for the applications. I guess we figured that since we’d already submitted a bunch of documents we wouldn’t need anything else, that obviously is not the case!
We’ve noticed this week that getting a bank account, social insurance number, drivers license etc. is probably not going to be as straight forward as we thought, but thank God for internet forums and blogs!! Honestly, how did people know what to do when they moved before the internet? It seems that getting setup in Canada is a bit of a strange loop: you need a bank account and a credit score to get an apartment, but in order to get a bank account you need to have proof of residence in the form of a water or electricity bill.. hmm.. a bit of a conundrum really. But thankfully we are not the first people to move to Canada so I am sure we can get the advice and help we need when we get there. Also, which is possibly the most worrying part, is that we might need to retake our drivers theory tests and I’m not convinced either of us will actually pass them. Hopefully the paper we get from Finland saying we’ve both been driving for over 10 years will help our case. Fingers crossed!
In Finland, on the other hand, we need to make sure all our posessions are insured, check whether we need to cancel Bugi’s insurance, store the car somewhere safe and unregister it along with a seemingly infinitely long list of things we need to take care of before we leave.
20 days and counting!
-Elli
