Hello All,
I am new here.
I and my family landed in Calgary on the 27th September .It was a 9 hour flight from terminal 5 airport London Heathrow and i must say it is a journey you have to prepare your kids for if you must travel with them. Once landed we were initially apprehensive that we had not filled any forms as adavised by another site that i and my wife were reading from. But as soon as we approached the customs officials it was clear our apprehension was unmerited. These are definitely the best and most polite immigration officials i have seen in my life.
The Immigration officials were ever polite and explained each process clearly before embarking on taking the landing forms and asking us to sign them in line with visas issued. Infact i can say we spent more time looking for the 10 boxes my wifey packed than with the immigration officials
They told us to expect our PR cards in 6-8weeks , i honestly hope it will be sooner. Please make sure you have an address to receive your PR card before you land in Canada as it is required for receipt of your PR card even if it is a hotel.
From there we were picked up by a friend's brother in law who took us straight to their home - 20 minutes from the airport. We pretty much thank God for the oppurtunity and slept that evening. we actually hoped to obtain our SIN and Health insurance on Friday but we could not so we will do that tomorrowMonday.
We have opened accounts but we cant get credit cards yet as we are yet to provide SIN to really identify us to their system. i reckon once we have that it should be a lot more straight forward. We have gotten mobile phone lines - my wife has a contract line which our benefactor has to stand for us as we do not have the mysterious SIN yet . So i opted for a pay as you go line. we are right now preparing our journey out tomorrow and have started making enquiries about getting an apartment and a car (most likely used) so we can move around and integrate quickly into teh community.
I wish all of us success in this plan to emigrate but advise that that we more focus on the long term and have a plan for that before travelling down here. I will post another update probably at the end of the month. i wish us all the best.