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Published: April 17th 2013
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I can't believe we've actually done it!! Final preparations were made on Monday of packing bags and saying our goodbyes to family and friends, and then began a long sleepless night (i think we only slept around an hour at the most just from the excitement of leaving!) before the taxi came to pick us up at around 5am on Tuesday morning.
The flight itself was ok, we flew with Air Transat, a non stop flight so in the end the flight took around 9 1/5 hours, long i know! but we got to Vancouver eventually at around 11:30 am and then began the longest wait I've ever had going through border control. With around 200 people waiting in line and only one desk open it took us an hour just to get past the first officer to just be told to go and wait in another line to receive our visas. (I still hadn't received my letter of induction from the Canadian government saying i had been approved for the working visa, Jade already had so the next two hours were pretty stressful as I tried to think of a way i could talk the next officer around to
giving me a visa which i may not have even been approved for as of yet)
After the two hours we finally got called forward and tried to explain that i hadnt received anything yet, and he turned out to be a pretty nice bloke and checked my file on the system and the letter was actually there!! wooo.....so within 5 minutes we both had our visas, Jade didn't even have to say anything, i think he just wanted to get rid of us! so now we can find work whenever we want as the visa itself last for a year, and it feels like a massive wait has been lifted off my shoulders.
We finally got to our hostel, the samesun backpackers lodge in Downtown Vancouver soon after. At £25 a night its a really good place to stay and would recommend it to anyone planing on coming to Vancouver as it seems to be in the middle of everything and theres only a short walk to most places........it even comes with its own bar downstairs! which is pretty useful, and free breakfast and wifi amongst other things. It pretty much has everything you need for getting yourself sorted before finding somewhere to rent.
I'm glad we actually got our own room for the first few nights so it meant we could get a few hours sleep without getting woken up when we first arrived as we were both knackered! We did still manage to go out for a short walk in the evening though just to try and actually take it in the we were here after planing on coming over for so long. Vancouver itself is an amazing city! surrounded by nearby mountains and lakes, there seems to be marinas and harbours everywhere.
We had only been here a few hours and already we had ended up in an Irish pub, which felt a bit surreal, but got talking to some Canadians and they are actually some of the nicest people i have ever met, everyone here just seems so laid back and friendly.
Well tomorrows our first full day and we plan to just take it easy and have a little look around while we get over our jet-lag! So we'll add another blog with some more pictures tomorrow!
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