Friday, 27 April 2012

The Middle 1 The first two days


Day 1: Sunday, 8 April 2012:
Wakefulness came with the realisation that we still don’t have our bags and that the clothes we’ve been wearing for the past two days will have to suffice for another day. In SA Kobus joked that a pair of underpants can be worn for 4 days, right side round, wrong side round, then turn it inside out and repeat days 1 and 2. He didn’t know that he was going to have to put this theory to the test so soon. The same laundry sparing procedure posed some peculiar difficulties with my G-string.....
Retail therapy was a no-go as everything was closed, it being Easter Sunday.
My grey Ford
At least we could pick up our two rental Ford Escapes, so at least had some wheels. Driving from the car rental place back to the hotel was my first taste of driving on the right hand side of the road. Sheer unadulterated terror. I kept chanting “keep right, keep right”, and then my semi-dyslexic brain would summarily forget which side was right and I had to check where my watch was to get my bearings. Any type of crossing became a Rubicon with cars coming at me from unexpected directions. The reflex to glance up and to the left to check the rear view mirror now suddenly had me staring through the side window. The mirror was now up and to the right!
Kobus's red Ford
We left my car at the hotel and took to the streets with Kobus’s. The rest of the day was spent driving around the city, having supper at a restaurant and an early collapse into bed.

Day 2: Monday, 9 April 2012:
This day was our 18th wedding anniversary. Who would have thought that 18 years after promising to love and to hold that we would find ourselves in a new country in the midst of so much change.
And what better way to celebrate than to finally get our bags!! Oh the simple joy to have your own stuff again, clean clothes, clean underwear, pajamas, games for the kids, your own toothbrush, hair brush, face cream and shampoo. Whoever said that material things don't matter has never spent 2 days in a new country in a hotel room with 2 boys without anything of their own.
The bags have arrived!!!

We went to Bell, one of the big cell phone providers, to get connected. The sales lady’s excitement at making a deal on this blustery cold Monday morning quickly disappeared when she realized that we did not yet officially exist in Canada and she could therefore not sell us any SIM cards. Ghosts we were without social insurance numbers, OHIP cards and/or driver’s licenses. Buying a starter pack at a supermarket, loading it with airtime and getting onto the airwaves is not possible in Canada. Canadian pre-paid and SA pre-paid is not the same thing! She gave us her business card and told us to call her as soon as our existence have been confirmed by the powers that be. I wonder with what I was supposed to call her and informed her that we will be sending smoke signals..... In the modern world of today to not have a cell phone is like dying. You feel disjointed and not completely whole. Stupid I know, but there it is.
We went to Wal-Mart to stock up on some groceries. The variety was overwhelming and very few brands were recognisable. Long life milk does not exist, the cream soda is pink and doesn’t taste like the smooth green stuff from home, salami tastes like bad polonie (ughh!) and my kids took one taste of the mayonnaise and collapsed in fits of disgust. I eventually bought 3 different brands of mayonnaise before we found one that they liked.

The brand new Canadian housewife in me knew that I was going to have to do laundry and washing powder and fabric softener was on the list. There I stood, mile long shelves stacked from top to bottom with what I hoped was laundry products in unfamiliar packaging with strange color schemes and unrecognisable names. Each one promised to demolish any stain, be it from this world or not, in cold water, warm water, hand wash, machine wash, front loader or top loader. I eventually chose Tide Pods, based purely on the fact that I saw it advertised on TV the previous night. Viva marketing!! The fabric softener was chosen as the bottle’s shape and color scheme resembled Sta Soft, our trusted SA brand, and to this day I couldn’t tell you the product’s name.
Our house hunting also commenced. Rentals in Guelph are a dime a dozen, if you are a student. It being a student town there are loads of apartments, townhouses, basements and other student friendly adobes available. But good luck in finding a nice big family house. After scouring kijiji (a website where you can buy or look for anything) we found 2 houses that piqued our interest. The first was a typical middle class Canadian house. It was nice and had the required amount of bedrooms but it was just way too small. There was no way my dining room table was going to fit in anywhere, except maybe in the garage.
from the front
The second house took our breath away. It was a huge two storey house situated in 100 acres (about 40ha) of woodland. The rooms were big with huge windows framing the most gorgeous views of the surrounding woods. There was room for all our furniture and it was only 2km out of town. Ideal!! It does have ghastly 1980's psychodelic carpets in pink and blue (imagine what our Nguni skins were gonna look like on these...) and Biggie Bestesque flowery wallpaper in the bedrooms. But they say you can't have it all....
from the back
These flowers are just not me













We also visited our new banker at the Royal Bank of Canada. Kobus had opened a bank account when he was in Canada during February and we just went to meet her, a lovely, friendly and very helpful lady. Canada’s banking system is overall very progressive but some things are still positively archaic. The favourite mode of payment is still cheques, those strange old world strips of paper that we haven’t used in years!! Electronic funds transfers seem to be regarded with some strange deep seated suspicion and is not widely used at all. We needed lessons from the bank on how to fill out a cheque!! I even heard of faxing cheques and e-mailing money but haven't yet figured these modes of payment out. If you pay at any store with a debit or credit card you swipe the card yourself and enter the required pin. The card never leaves your hand, which seems to be a pretty secure system, and the drive through ATM's are just brilliant!

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