"Adventure is worthwhile" - Amelia Earhart

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Trip Start Sep 12, 2007 Trip End Sep 11, 2008 Next
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  Leeds, United Kingdom
Thursday, March 1, 2007

It's almost a year since I was last in North America and the dormant desire to live and work as a visiting Limey wormed it's way to the surface. The original plan was to live somewhere in the great expanse of the United States (somehow managing to live with a family who had a white picket fence and a holiday home in the Hamptons) however my slight aversion to small children (or rather - any size of child) proved rather a hindrance as I searched for job ideas.
 
COME AND AND EXPERIENCE SUMMER CAMP!!!

BE AN AU PAIR!!!
 
Shouted to me from the majority of adverts. I thought I'd found a convenient loophole when I discovered the job title 'campower' which basically involved either being a general gopher behind the scenes as domestic staff or working in administration in the camp office organising trips and suchlike. Perfect! I thought and prepared to warm up my passport. Small catch in that you have to be a student to do this. Why? Surely to be an organising admin whiz you'd be a bit more attractive if you had experience in said job. As I have. Well, apparently not - students only and we won't believe you're going back to your studies in the UK unless you PROVE IT as the all the small print smirked meanly.
 
'Humph' I grumped. Who wants to earn £70 a week for 6 days over 7 of split shifts for 4 months anyway? Been there, done that and at least at Butlins there was somewhere to go on my 1 day off (Bognor Regis - which is as glamorous as you'd expect). On Summer Camp you'd have a choice of woods or lake - all of which would be full of other people's children.
 
Back to the drawing board. I could find a company to sponsor me to work for them in USA. Hmm - too much like hard work and anyway - then I'd have to do a proper job and everyone knows interns get treated like slaves and don't get paid. You've seen E.R.
 
I could just get a tourist Visa for 3 months. But then I can't work - which is the point of working abroad really. And how would I afford to splurge in Abercrombie & Fitch without a job?
 
Various people murmured 'what about Australia?' at me but my thinking is: 'It's too far, it's too hot' and how on earth will I afford the plane fare? And I'm not going to get many visitors if they have to re-mortgage their houses to get there.
 
Then Ferl mentioned Canada. About which I knew precisely nothing apart from a small notion they have bears and snow and it's really clean. And there was a city called Toronto and another one called Vancouver - but that was the extent of my knowledge.
 
So off I went to the library and sat on the floor reading huge piles of books about emigrating to Canada. And then I abused Borders' hospitality and sat on the floor for weeks on end devouring guide books. I stopped doing that after a while as people started recognising me and assumed I worked there, interrupting my studies with silly questions about the whereabouts of maps of Timbuctoo. I discovered I quite fancied living in a country that was the 2nd largest after Russia, that had snow (no.1 reason let's face it) and had beaches and mountains in the same city and spoke at least one  language I could get by in.
 
So the next question was how do I get in? And then I found the good people at BUNAC. I dragged Sarah and Aimee off to presentations at various universities. Well - they came with me to one at the 'proper uni' here in Leeds but wouldn't touch the Met with a bargepole. Hah. Wimps. Frightened of a little real life?
 
This was all happening between March and September 2006. So in between boring everyone to tears I settled down to wait until the application forms from Work Canada became available on the BUNAC website. Finally December 1st rolled (or rather crawled) round and after a few tantrums (shiny new colour printer behaving badly) all the paperwork was breathlessly placed carefully in the hands of Royal Mail. Well -  I was hardly going to trust Hospital post with it was I?
 
I lived in fear of being too late and missing out on the few precious non-student work visas that are issued each year. Even though I'd posted the forms off within about half an hour of them appearing on the website and put 8 first class stamps on the envelope 'just to make sure'. Then the hallowed letter arrived. Or the first hallowed letter at any rate, to say I'd been accepted onto the programme and they had therefore cashed my cheque for the Working Visa. £160.00. Not bad for a year's holiday. Hmm.
 
Very quickly all the scary forms arrived. The ones which were badly photocopied and had pages of instructions on how to fill them in. You know the types - ones where if you forget to dot an 'I' it all gets posted back to you ripped up into pieces with a rude note asking just how you expect to be taken seriously if you can't fill in a simple form. As an aside - if BUNAC can afford to send a freshly printed colour form on glossy paper to me why can't the Candian government?
 
Having asked most people I know and a few I didn't to check everything on the application form it was off to the postbox with another 8 stamps worth of postage and a 6 week wait for the man at the Canadian High Comission to decide I'm clearly not an axe murderer and to let me in. The little postcard arrived from BUNAC to say they'd sent it off to the man with the red stamp and then - 4 weeks later and 2 weeks earlier than expected (well done there) - I got my most prized possession (well - apart from my Lulu Guinness bag and rare deleted Roxette CD but you get the idea).
 
I was in. My work Visa authorisation for Canada had been issued. It was only a year later but I was on my way. Now to save up for the flights.

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