Category: Expatriate


Wow, there is a lot that you can not do before you have a work/study visa or permanent residence. It is honestly surprising to me. The two that I discovered today is that I can not open a banking account nor can I purchase cellular service.

In consideration, the banking makes sense. Matter of fact, the general movement of money seems to be the big wall between countries. So, I should reason anything that requires a contractual financial agreement also falls into that purview.

So, to accomplish one of these two acts you need to be: A Citizen of Country, A permanent resident, or on an approved visa. Beyond that, legal photo id (a current passport from any country will do.)

This is really a short entry but it’s again mainly for my info as well as anyone else. On the flip side. Whjen I get that Visa… I have armed myself with Knolwedge and won’t be sitting around twiddling my thumbs.

It has been almost exactly a year and a quarter since I’ve posted anything to my poor little neglected blog. So much has happened, so much.

Somewhere in the last night/early this morning range, I published my first app to the Apple app store. I have to emphasis “my” because I have published no less than 10 apps to the store. They just weren’t mine. While the app isn’t really much more than a meager data viewer… It’s still something that I designed, wrote, finished, and published.

I think this is the result of finally finding a medication to treat a depression that was far more severe than I understood. Over the past month I have been far more focused than I have in years. And being as though about 3 years ago I took a rather hard swan dive into depression; this is a good reversal.

So… what’s with the Expatriate thing? Well, I am slowly making my transition to live the latter half of my life out in Canada rather than the US. This process is a LOT more difficult than I would have thought. There is so much involved and to understand that I simply had no idea what I would need to do. Also; I’ve discovered that even researching online leaves me often scratching my head. So, I’ve decided to write my experiences (as best as I write) in this blog; in the event anyone else decides to do this.

My situation is thus: I am a legally married polyamorous adult. I have a wife and a nigh-teenage child, I have one girlfriend who has grade school children, and I have one girlfriend who is the adult caretaker for a parent with cancer. The girlfriend with the children is a Canadian born European.

The plan is to get my girlfriend and her daughters settled and into life in Canada while my spouse researches returning to school for her Masters and I research getting hired as a 30 yr software engineer. Once one of those things happen, we move up with our son. Our other girlfriend is in a complicated situation but we do discuss it regularly.

So phase one is getting G1 settled. This already has been… difficult. To get a place to live you need to have Canadian or at least American rental/credit history. 90+% of landlords will not rent to you without this. We discovered this as one landlord dragged us through paperwork for 2 weeks until telling us he was going to consider someone else. It took another 2 weeks for me to be notified he’d signed a lease for someone else. The solution seems to be offering 6 months down.

So, why the house first? Well, everything depends on residency. And that means, ID card, insurance, banking, the whole lot. So today we begin checking…. what can you do without an address? Well for starters; you can pay about one months luxury rent on a hotel room. (Which we’re doing)… At least we have a roof (after living in the states for awhile)

To start this week, we need to make living out of a hotel a reasonable experience. I’ve started the process of unlocking our AT&T iPhones which should be easily old enough to be released from their network prison. Next up will be talking to someone at an electronics shop to get advise on SIM chips and other necessary comforts of home.