To the glory of the God, my family and I had a safe trip to Montreal, Canada on the 28th of September, 2012. Below is the gist of the landing experience.
Our flight was via Royal Air Maroc for 6.50 am, we got to the MM airport at about 5.30am, checking in took a few minutes because we had to rearrange our baggage to max of 23kg per bag X2 allowed for each passenger (i.e. 3 plus 1 infant), luckily all our baggage scaled through with the rest carried as hand luggage without paying for extra despite all the food stuff packed i.e. elubo, garri, ogi, dried fish, beans etc to name a few. Scaling through the immigration and other officials was very brief and as soon as we were done we boarded the plane immediately.
The flight to Casablanca lasted about 4 hours and our connecting flight to Montreal was for another 4 hours which flew by in no time, again we boarded with ease and this time the flight lasted another 8 hours to Montreal, Canada. The on-board experience was cool though no movies, the meal was ok but not of the class of Emirate airline if you know what I mean.
After landing, scaling through the immigrations was easy after declaring the items in our baggage and we were referred to see the Canadian Boarder Services after picking our baggage which was intact. There were other landed immigrants so it took some time to get to our turn. We were asked whether we would be bringing in other stuff later and we answered no, we were asked to updated our address as soon as we have one for the processing of the PR cards, we were given details for other service we would need to contact for our integration process and also advised on the importance of the safe keeping of our COPR forms. There was no further check of our baggage & POF which was only declared, the officer advised that it is better to withdraw from ATM outside the airport because the withdrawal amount in the airport has been pegged to about only $300. The whole process took about 2 and half hours.
Right from the airport, picking a taxi was with a queuing system and we were gotten a van because of our plenty baggage and off we went to a hotel. We were in the hotel for two days and with the assistance of a landed senior in the person of Francomaj (simply a fantastic person) we were able to secure an apartment by Sunday (Gods favor) and moved in immediately.
Monday, we registered for our SIN and Medical Insurance (the MI was treated as having landed the whole of September, hence we have only 2 months waiting period, God's favor I guess), we were also able to open bank accounts. Tuesday, continued with other registrations as part of the integration process and getting things to get us well settled in the new apartment.
The Canadian experience has been really great, the weather is still very ok, we even had some periods of sunshine yesterday, the system works very well with the metro, buses and the general transportations system, one can easily find his way around with a map.
I'm currently playing catch up with limited internet access (currently working on having one at home), hence my congrats goes to all those that have had one form of update or the other, for all those still expecting one form of update or the other, God will make it happen soonest.
Cheers
