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on arrive!
Aug. 16th, 2005 10:09 pmAfter 20 hours of flying, Max and I arrived at Vancouver international airport this morning at 10h15.
We got out of Immigration at 14h00--2pm folks. What a freakin’ mess!
We got through passport control quickly and were told to collect our bags and go into the “new immigrants” room. Bags were already out (6 big 32kg suitcases, plus our 2 carry-ons each), so we dragged them over to Imm and entered. We were told to take a place in line--which apparently meant a seat--and wait. About 10 minutes later a volunteer called us over, asked some questions, gave us some (quite good, from a cursory glance) reading materials, and were told to move up a whole row (!) and sit down again. There were at most 20 people ahead of us, almost entirely families.
Over the course of two hours, we slowly shuffled towards the first point of contact with a CBSA officer. She reviewed Max’s record of landing, pronounced his photo as “having a crease”--requiring a new photo to be taken by them. Honestly, there was a teeny crease if you held the photo at one particular angle with respect to a bright light. Fine. Whatever.
Photo retaking seemed to happen for at least half the folks--perhaps because of the way Record of Landing documents are sent to us in our home countries (no sleeve or protective device)? It took 30 minutes to get the photo redone.
It took about 45 minutes to get Encounter #2 with the next CBSA officer. Everything was going well until she noticed that a couple of electronic devices didn’t have serial numbers. One was a photo printer, for which I gave the model and make; the other was a wireless keyboard, for which there was no serial number and which happened to have a rather generic-sounding name. She muttered about this for a bit, called over a colleague, and Max finally said “you’re talking items with a total value less than $200. How much duty would we be talking about for such a small amount anyway?”
The rest of our exchange was curt--we’d been on the go for over 30 hours by now, and both our patiences were fried. But they accepted our Goods to Follow list verbatim (without the serial number) and we were on our way. Not an impressive welcome to Canada. And it appeared those migrants whose English command was marginal (or non-existent) were having an
even tougher time of it.
But it’s done. Once I catch up on sleep (by Christmas perhaps), I might just drop the Ministers in question a love letter or two.
John Egan
j’ai la tête qui éclate, je m’voudrais seulement dormir...
We got out of Immigration at 14h00--2pm folks. What a freakin’ mess!
We got through passport control quickly and were told to collect our bags and go into the “new immigrants” room. Bags were already out (6 big 32kg suitcases, plus our 2 carry-ons each), so we dragged them over to Imm and entered. We were told to take a place in line--which apparently meant a seat--and wait. About 10 minutes later a volunteer called us over, asked some questions, gave us some (quite good, from a cursory glance) reading materials, and were told to move up a whole row (!) and sit down again. There were at most 20 people ahead of us, almost entirely families.
Over the course of two hours, we slowly shuffled towards the first point of contact with a CBSA officer. She reviewed Max’s record of landing, pronounced his photo as “having a crease”--requiring a new photo to be taken by them. Honestly, there was a teeny crease if you held the photo at one particular angle with respect to a bright light. Fine. Whatever.
Photo retaking seemed to happen for at least half the folks--perhaps because of the way Record of Landing documents are sent to us in our home countries (no sleeve or protective device)? It took 30 minutes to get the photo redone.
It took about 45 minutes to get Encounter #2 with the next CBSA officer. Everything was going well until she noticed that a couple of electronic devices didn’t have serial numbers. One was a photo printer, for which I gave the model and make; the other was a wireless keyboard, for which there was no serial number and which happened to have a rather generic-sounding name. She muttered about this for a bit, called over a colleague, and Max finally said “you’re talking items with a total value less than $200. How much duty would we be talking about for such a small amount anyway?”
The rest of our exchange was curt--we’d been on the go for over 30 hours by now, and both our patiences were fried. But they accepted our Goods to Follow list verbatim (without the serial number) and we were on our way. Not an impressive welcome to Canada. And it appeared those migrants whose English command was marginal (or non-existent) were having an
even tougher time of it.
But it’s done. Once I catch up on sleep (by Christmas perhaps), I might just drop the Ministers in question a love letter or two.
John Egan
j’ai la tête qui éclate, je m’voudrais seulement dormir...
