I first intended to make it a blog about the stuffs I love doing, namely snowboarding, surfing, dancing and what’s going on in the culture the surrounds those sports, but that was inspired by the life I was living in Vancouver.
Not that I was keeping up very well with it when I was in Van but now that I have left it almost hurts talking about it. And I have to focus on other things if I want to sort my life out while I am in Europe.

The plan is to go back out to Canada asap but we need to sort out that permanent residency situation and I also need to take a step back to try to see the bigger picture. In short I need to focus on a real career that could be both pleasurable for me, help me build a future (cause apparently I am not getting any younger) and still pay for the fun stuffs… And quite frankly I am confused as of what this career would be.

Anyhoo, I am in Devon in the UK right now at Jimmy’s parents. I’m disgustingly jetlagged, I am sleeping about 4 hours a night, waking up at 3am and spending the rest of the day fighting the sleep so I can go to bed decently tired at night. But no matter how tired I am, I can’t sleep more than 4 hours a night and it’s starting to drive me nuts. Talking about careers, one thing I know for sure is that I could not be a air hostess. Besides the fact that I am too short and sometimes I can’t close the overhead luggage thing in the plane without climbing on the seat.

On a different note, Vancouver’s Olympic games were amazing. I heard somewhere that Canadians showed an enthusiasm for the games that was unprecedented. What amazed me the most, apart from the fact that people were queuing up to 8 hours to get on the downtown zipline, is that violence didn’t really seem to have its place in the celebrations. I am pretty sure if this had happened in France or in the UK (the 2 other countries I have lived in) people would have ended up beating the crap out of each other. So here you have another reason why I love Canada so much!

Right, that’s all I have to say for now, it’s nearly 6 am and I am going to try and go back to sleep for a little while…

The day after I got back, Jimmy and I drove to the border to get a border agent to approve my new employer on my visa. Don’t ask. My visa is some sort of administrative arsehole. So we got there I presented all the paperwork to a young and ugly border agent who, I noticed straight away, was sporting a nice ‘trainee’ badge.  She took a quick look and asked me to go and sit down.

We saw her look through the papers again and then her fat and even uglier supervisor went over and started looking through as well. Moments later, I saw them getting on the phone, and then hanging up and bursting into laughs. The trainee called me over “You know that lying to a border agent is a serious offense that could jeopardize any future work permit or permanent residency application right?”, me “Absolutely”, her “So why did you say you haven’t started working for this company, I just called them and Alyson told me you’ve been working for them for weeks?”, me ” Sorry there must be a misunderstanding, I don’t know who Alyson is, I haven’t met her yet because I have not yet started working there, she probably misunderstood your question. Please ask to speak to Rebecca or Callie, they are the ones who hired me”, her “So you are saying that the person I spoke to on the phone was lying?” me “No… I just think she misunderstood your question”, her “I don’t believe you, I’m going to ask you to give me your bag, your wallet and your phones (Jimmy’s as well), go and sit down”. Naturally, when this kind of stuff happens I instantly switch to guilt mode even if I have no reasons to. I swear if I had to go through a lie detector I’d fail even if I was telling the truth.

So anyway, I went back to my seat.I saw her give another couple of phone calls. I guess she spoke to Alyson again and cleared the misunderstanding cause she didn’t mention anything again. Then she called Jimmy over and asked for his passport. She wanted to see his visa. She took the passport and asked him to go back and sit down. And so on for the next couple of hours, she kept calling us back to the desk, asked us random questions, to which we tried to respond in the best and simplest way possible, and then we’d get asked to go back and sit.

In the end she called me again and told me she was not going to validate this employer and this job on my visa. It didn’t really come as a surprise, by then I knew things were jinxed. Then she looked at Jimmy’s work visa and said she needed to take it away. I tried to explain to her (in the least patronizing way possible) that he was entitled to that visa, being my common-law partner and all that… She seemed to agree… but then took a quick glance at her ugly supervisor and asked me to go back and sit again. Her fat and ugly supervisor, who had missed nothing from the conversation, called her over. And there again I saw them going through paperwork and all that.

Half an hour later she called us back again and announced that she was taking Jimmy’s work visa away. She got into some really convoluted explanation as for how she got to the conclusion that she could do that. I tried to argue it, in the most respectful and calm way possible but she totally lost it. So I surrendered. We took our stuffs back and before we left she said “I realize this puts you in a difficult position but I had no choice, if my supervisor hadn’t pointed it out I wouldn’t have known”. No kidding ugly bitch!

So there you go, we left the border with a useless work visa for me and a ‘visitors’ visa for Jimmy. How about that?

Even though we know we could fight it, it didn’t take us long to decide to leave it at that and go back home for a while. Wherever home is (somewhere between France and Paris).

It’s unexpected and sad but sometimes you’ve got to go with the flow not against it, right? Things have been so difficult in the last few months for us that I was starting to think that the Universe might be trying to send us a message. Maybe something incredible is waiting for us in Europe… I heard someone say (I think it was in the documentary ‘Home’, if you haven’t seen it here you can watch it for free) “Don’t cry about what you’ve lost, think about what you still have”. And this is exactly what I am going to do!