Merseyside is quite the slog I imagine. I’m from near Middlesbrough (yes they do still play footie, I believe they won something recently), so the drive is not quite as bad. I swear I was scared driving 80mph in the little Astra (I think?) we rented! Having driven here for three years mostly at 60km/h in a car that’s way too heavy to ever turn a corner, it was quite the experience!

The only DVDs we watch are Baby Einstein! And yes TV is somewhat like a labotamy at times, moreso with the commercials. Can’t win them all.

Well, the hardest part was saying goodbye to relatives and knowing that I may not see some of them ever again. That was very difficult.

Settling in, it really was a case of accepting my surroundings… and the new currency! It took a while to start ‘thinking in dollars’. First thing you do is convert everything into pounds and think ‘what an awesome deal!’. This doesn’t work out so well in the budgeting dept. and it wasn’t until I ’switched over’ to dollars that I actually realized how much things cost in context!

Things like coins are still a little fuzzy sometimes (why is that coin smaller than that one that’s worth more? And it looks the same, almost, too …) and I absolutely can’t STAND all the commercial breaks on tv. Now I understand why theres such a huge DVD market here and I’m quite happy to sacrifice regular ‘junk tv’ viewing for more quality DVD sittings instead.

My wife misses up-to-date soaps (!) and I miss a few of the alternative sitcoms, but they seem to be making their way over slowly on BBC Canada.

I know what you mean about not wanting to go back. I sometimes feel homesick but each time I go back to visit family, I remember why I left and thanks myself for leaving!

Absolutely. I went back to the UK in January… Arriving at Heathrow airport, it was dirty and noisy compared to Ottawa or Toronto. I went to pick up my hire car and (suprise,suprise) there was a mix up with the booking. I got another hire car (which cost more than I wanted to spend, as it turned out in the end) and pulled out of the airport. After getting stuck in traffic for an hour, it started to rain. 6 hours later (fighting through traffic most of the way up the motorway) I hit Merseyside. The area I’d lived in as a child seemed very different to how I remembered it … gone were the many beautiful old buildings to make way for supermarkets and new housing developments - existing architecture was just left to decay and rot, all boarded up. By that time, exactly why I left England wasn’t much of a mystery to me!

I still say ‘Alright?’ to people and it’s treated as a question.. funny little things like that. I’m adapting the way I speak to make life easier, though. I no longer say ‘garij’ … it’s ‘ga-raage’

Now … where did we put those PR forms? MUST get through them, MUST get through them!!

When I first started at my new job here, I would say “alright?” to people as I passed them in the corridor and they’d stare at me as though I had two heads. Also, I tried to order a tuna foot long at Subway as “chuna” one time and the ladies’ reply was “chicken”??

Heh heh! I know there are lots of us expats hiding in the woodwork, but it’s always interesting reading their stories and finding them living in Ottawa.

Thanks for the comment, fellow expat