The haves and the have nots

As our 3 month anniversary on Newfoundland is approaching, I thought it would be appropriate to look back and see what has changed for me.

When I started thinking about the three lists below, it struck me how life, essentially, stays the same no matter where you live and what you do, as long as you are bringing your family along. The routines will find their own place, you will still eat your oat meal the same way as you always did and you'll drink your coffee from the same mug with milk, like you always did. It's just made with different beans and different water, in a new kettle and with a 2% milk instead of 1,5%, but it's essentially the same cup of coffee you've always had.

However, there are some things that have changed and below you can find a list of them. But just to be fair, I also collected a list of things that I have been able to do in St. John's, even though I had initially perhaps thought that they'd be left behind in th city life of Copenhagen. Here goes!

Things I haven't done in the past three months:

1. Ridden my bike. Seen my bike. Had anything at all to do with bikes. (it's hiding in the shed, still wrapped up in the moving company's blue and white cardboard.)

2. Been to a concert. I don't think this has anything to do with St. John's as such, there are plenty of concerts here but I haven't had the chance yet.

3. Eaten Vietnamese food. Surprisingly, it seems that Vietnamese restaurants are missing from the St. John's selection, which is in fact a very decent selection of restaurants for a city of this size!

4. Gone to the office. As you know, I quit my job when moving here and have not been to work of any kind in the past three months. Apart from maternity leave, this has never happened before.

5. Taken the plane. Someone might think - what's so strange about that? But those knowing my pre-Canadian life will know that I was a regular guest at Copenhagen airport on a bi-weekly to monthly basis, so a three-month dry-spell in flying is a first in many years.

6. Taken the train.  (no explanation needed)

7. Taken the metro. (even less explanation needed)

8. Taken the bus. Here an explanation might be needed. See list of things I've done here but not in Copenhagen.

9. Climb four flights of stairs (daily). We used to live on 4th floor and I used to work on 5th floor. Taking the stairs was a daily routine, whereas we now live in a one-storey bungalow.

Things I have done in the past three months that I didn't do in Copenhagen:

1. Drive a car (on a daily basis). You need it here - if not for the distances, then for the hills, for the weather and for the condition of the sidewalks. There are buses, but due to bad reputation, I have not tried them out yet.

2. Go shopping for groceries and use the shopping cart. In Copenhagen shopping was small-scale - without a car you needed to carry everything home on your bike or back. Here even milk is in a 2l carton, so a basket is soon full! Cart it is. And now I bring my kid shopping with me every time, so I need a place for her to sit. Thus: a shopping cart.

3. Cook a meal every day. Back in Denmark we would eat even our breakfasts at the office, and often work late, so a daily meal cooked at home (several times) was not something we did. Now it's breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks - all made at home.

4. Buy fresh bread at the bakery every second day. While bakeries do exist in Copenhagen, they are very expensive and you can also get decent bread at the supermarket. Here, if you want nice bread, you have to go to the bakery (more on that another time). So I do - we're now regular guests at our local Georgestown bakery where I have even managed to find dark rye bread!

Dark rye from Georgestown Bakery

5. See the Maersk ships in the harbour. Having lived in the home town of Maersk for the past 7 years, I rarely saw the ships at all. Now the whole St. John's based fleet is visible to our eyes on a daily basis and I find it very nice!

Finally, things I liked about Copenhagen and have also been able to do here:

1. Have weekend brunch. It's not quite as common as in Copenhagen, but you can get a really nice brunch for example at Mallard Cottage.

The cake buffet of Mallard Cottage weekend brunch

2. Take long walks in the city. This you can definately do here, and you are more likely to find nature than in Copenhagen. I'm enjoying the walks, but struggling with the hills.

3. Go to a museum. I'll write more about this later, but one of our closest neighbours is the excellent museum, gallery and archives of The Rooms.

View from The Rooms towards The Narrows

4. See a movie that is not a blockbuster. For a few months I thought that this was impossible, but last weekend I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival World tour and saw a lot of non-blockbuster films about things outdoorsy. Very nice!

Illegal immigrants?

Upon our arrival in Canada we were to go through the process of immigration and applying for a work permit, which, following advice from our immigration lawyer (”It’s a piece of cake, completely standard, there will be no problems at all, no, you definitely should not do it from Denmark but wait until your port of arrival”) we had not done before arriving in Canada. This had already caused me a bit of extra sweating and heartbeats, as having worked in the field for the past years, I know that things aren’t always what they seem and people without problems are not always people without problems.

You are, after all, dealing with persons who might have a good day, a bad day, or anything in between, and even though there are laws and regulations to follow, they might be applied in slightly different manner from one person to another.

Once our plane landed, we walked to customs, produced our papers and were then rightly referred to the immigration officials at St. John’s airport. Those of you who have been to the airport will know that it’s small and there’s not much happening, so it was not strange when the immigration officers told us just to leave our luggage standing in the luggage hall – they would still be there when we’d be finished. “This will just take a minute”. Then the time began running. Our daughter was hungrier and hungrier but luckily our flight snacks were still untouched in the backpack.

 

Autumn leaves in St. John's

Then they called my husband in. I played endless games of hide and seek behind pillars, had to change our daughter, and was getting hungry myself. It was about an hour after our plane had landed and there were no other persons apart from us and the immigration officer at the door in sight. Then the colleagues came out and told their colleague at the door also to leave – this would take a while.

My suspicions grew and once my husband came out and said: “They also have some questions for you”, I grew nervous. Was this “a piece of cake? Completely standard? No problem at all?”

In I went with our daughter in tow and the first word I heard was a “red flag”. The system had given the immigration officers a red flag and they had to investigate. Could I tell them more about my visit to Canada in 2012? Why was I there? How long did I stay? Had I been employed in Denmark since then? Where was our daughter born? Had my husband been with me to Denmark? Why had we BOTH been to Canada in 2012 but not in the same city?

All very suspicious. The “system” had told the immigration officers that me and my husband had arrived in Canada in the summer of 2012 (him in June in St. John’s, me in August in Montreal) and that we had never left the country since then. The suspicion was that we had been illegally residing in Canada for the past over two years and were now covering for this by applying for a work permit.

Luckily we were well prepared with a bunch of papers, employment records, birth certificates and I’m sure the look on my face when I heard these ridiculous suspicions was also a good indicator of just how funny and silly a mistake they had made. Having been employed in Denmark the whole time, both me and my husband could easily show that whoever had flagged us had done a poor job.

We all laughed about it at the end, but this made me think a lot about other people, of other backgrounds and reasons and colors and religions and statuses. Canada does not provide an exit stamp when you leave the country, so unless you can actively prove that you have been elsewhere, you cannot really prove that you have left the country either. 

For suspected illegal immigrants, the officials at St. John’s airport treated us very nicely. Our daughter got crayons and a booklet to paint in, they were keeping us up to date on the developments and their progress with producing our papers once they decided that we were indeed arriving with “clean flour in our bag” as we say in Finland. 

At the Cape Spear lighthouse

For those of you who have an interest in the topic, Citizenship and Immigration Canada have a good overview of immigration statistics available on their website: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/index.asp. As you can see here: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/data-release/2014-Q2/index.asp the persons who apply for temporary residence in Canada, such as ourselves, are in any case very likely to be allowed in the country. In Jan-Jun 2014 of the 1,1 million applications for temporary residence, 1 million were accepted and only 170,000 rejected. From that basis and knowing our background in terms of employment history and education, it is understandable that our immigration lawyer would call our case “piece of cake”. However, a red flag is a red flag and having visited Canada in August 2012 without my husband, I could not have imagined that more than two years later I would be questioned about the reasons and duration for the trip. Lessons to learn: never trust that things are as easy as they seem, and never expect that the system forgets you. 

(And for the record: the pictures are in no way related to the above text - only there for you, my dear readers! The credits for the photos go, as much of the time, to JK.)

The day when St. John's lost its sidewalks

(Reader advisory: irony ahead)

To be sang with the melody of 'This used to be our playground' by Madonna

(What? You don't know it? Didn't have the C-cassette back in the 90s? OK, then maybe just wait for the next post or look at the pictures.)

'This used to be our sidewalk

This used to be our stroller's path

This used to be the street I'd walk on

On my way to this or that

No more,

Now there is snow and ice, 

And nobody clearing it'

(Side note: the stroller has been replaced by a Stiga Snow racer, but it's proving to be a little risky method of transportation taking into account the steepness of hills and E's need to learn to use the breaks. Status on the Stiga driving school and the height of snow banks to be expected in a few weeks).

The Bannerman Park

In Copenhagen we lived next to Skydebanehaven for more than four years, and with or without kids, it was our haven inside the busy city. With the green space for lying on the grass, benches for my coffee during maternity leave and s great playground once E was big enough to use it. So, looking for a house in St. John's, one of our criteria was: close to a playground, preferably a park.

And we got what we wanted!

Five minutes walk downhill from our house is the Bannerman Park, which is currently being redone but lucky for us, almost finalised! The playground opened literally one week after we moved in, and is one of the best ones in town.

During the winter, there is a skating rink, the Bannerman Loop, which is free, nicely lit and well maintained, with music playing. So naturally we had to get skates! (Still to be tested, so that story will be told later...)

During the summer there is softball, swimming and a splash pool for kids, which I'm looking forward to seeing in action.

Apparently, the park is celebrating 150 years of existence and the renovations have been made thanks to donations, which seems to be the way to do things here. Having lived in countries where the Public Money takes care of projects like this, I'm always astonished by the 'Community initiatives' here, which us in the Nordics could as well learn from. Yes, I know it's a different way of running a state and its public finances, but I still think there might be a blog coming about it, as it was indeed interesting for me to pay the entrance to a museum by bringing a 'non-perishable food item' as I did before Christmas.

Here a small poster about the park:

And a little monkey in winter gear on her way down the scary slide!

(Oh and I should say that it is Public Money, I believe, which keeps The Loop running and in order!)

The winter sun

Mentally, moving to Newfoundland felt like moving to the far North. That coming from a person who was born and raised not far from the Polar Circle, but it's no secret that getting here is difficult, and once you're here, there are not a lot of places to go very easily. Looking at the map, however, you can see that St. John's shares its latitude (47 degrees North) with another important city in this family's life: Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany.

Having lived the large majority of my life up North seen from Newfoundland, meaning Finland, Sweden or Denmark, what I find the most amazing in November, December and now in January is the sun. It gets to your eyes like the best spring sun of March or April - it makes you want to keep your sunglasses in your bag also during the months when Copenhagen is all about the dark, the rain, the dark and the rain (and well, candles).

Everyone warned us about the weather moving up here - but as I have discovered, it really was about moving "down here" for us, and that has meant that when it's not foggy, rainy, or snowy, it is bright! The sun is out and it makes everything look so beautiful, like last week in the Quidi Vidi village.

Quidi Vidi village in December sunshine

 Today, St. John's had 8,5 hours of daylight, whereas Copenhagen had its 7h 15 minutes. Not to talk about Oulu in Finland, with its 4 h and 4 minutes of daylight. So welcome, visitors from Denmark and Finland! I can't promise you good weather, but when it's not foggy, rainy, or snowing, it will be bring!

January 1st sunshine in downtown St. John's

The sun on our street today, with the Cabot tower and Signal Hill in the background

Up and running

As intimidating as it is to start your first blog, it is even more intimidating to think about the promise you make to yourself of writing about whatever it is that you will be writing about, regularly, in the coming months, a bit like a diary.

I've been happy to see my husband J starting to write down notes of our comings and goings since our daughter E was born, and having always had a diary stored safely on my shelf, rarely opened, I felt that quitting my job and moving to another continent might be the right time to start writing again. For the past seven years my hands have rarely left the computer keyboard but rarely has the text been about something that I have experienced, have views or opinions about, or just want to share with other people. Reports, reports and reports - but as those days are over, for now, I'm happy to use the keyboard for something else instead.

I did read that a blog should be about something specific, about something that interests you and about something that interests other people. I will stick to the one in between - things that interest me - and right now they are closely related to my new home country, province and city: Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador and St. John's. It will be things that are obvious to the locals but that puzzle me; it will be small notes on our daily doings, and some pictures to keep the folks back in Europe happy and up-to-date.

The name of the blog can speak for itself, and a shout-out to TSVB for pushing my thinking into the windy direction in terms of the names for blogs.

So, with these words - welcome and stay tuned!