Canada Blog: From Work Permit To Permanent Residence

Because of the new tax laws in Ukraine few of my friends have decided to leave the country for good. One of them - my best friend Dmytro Steflyuk. He’s decided to move to Toronto. For Russian-speaking readers, please follow his new Twitter feed @uanadaand tumblr blog where he’s describing his experiences with relocation.

And again, quite a long time without posts… hope this one will be useful for new immigrants in Canada.

Last week I decided to take a test for G1 driver license (so called student’s license that’d allow me to take a driving test and then buy a car). After a short research I’ve figured out that I’d need to take the following steps:

• Get a letter from Ukrainian consulate that’d proof my Ukrainian driver license validity.
• Go to a drivers test center, pay something about $100, get my vision checked and then take G1 test.

This is it So, on monday I went to Ukrainian consulate on Bloor Street West (next to High Park). I paid $40 for the translation and approval of the validity and it took them 3 days to finish the work. Procedure was pretty straighforward and I really liked the experience of working with Ukrainian consulate.

When I got the papers, I went to the test center in the Downsview Park. They checked my vision, asked me to pay $85 bucks and gave me the test papers. In 15 minutes I was a proud owner of a G1 drivers license and now I’m going to prepare for the driving test.

Hope this helps someone.

It took a long time before I decided to continue writing about our life in Canada. I wasn’t writing too much because many interesting and (sometimes) disturbing things were happening here, but now it looks like everything is fine again so it is time to tell our story here (see this and other following posts)

So, as you maybe noticed in this post’s subject, I’ve changed my work place. It was quite a painful process because my new employer is a company from the US. Actually, there were many factors which made this process painful and one of them was the fact that we didn’t know (we weren’t sure) that a US company could hire non-canadian citizens who are temporary canadian residents now. At the end we’ve retained really great lawyers (the best immigration lawyer in Canada and one of the best in the world) and they’ve helped us to fill all papers and make it easy to switch to the new employer.

My new employer is Scribd.com - online document publishing company which is in top-500 sites in the Internet now (and growing). My primary duties there as a Scalability Expert are “simple” - our site needs to be able to keep up with growing popularity of the service. I still work remotely from Totonto, company’s head office is located in San Francisco, California.

So, here we are, I’ve started writing new posts again And, to emphasize the major idea of the post I’d like to say it again: if you’re not a canadian citizen, you CAN switch to a new employer even if it is non-canadian company (at least it works for the US companies).

Today I’ve found really nice video clip about Toronto - I like it because it is not professional video, and it shows us Toronto from generic people’s eyes. So, this is the place of our living.

Here they are - our latest photos.

Today we were dining in really great place - small authentic Italian restaurant near our place. Nice people, awesome food and just next to our place - everything we’d even dream of

Details - on their official site.

This week (July, 31) we’ve moved to Toronto! Now we live at St.Clair and Young - 1 minute to Subway (and 9 min to Downtown), 1 minute to great park, 24hrs food store (Sobey’s) just in the building - we love this apartment!

All our experience about moving and renting an apartment will be posted here in next few days - I decided to resurrect this blog today

Today we went crazy and spent 400 bucks on pretty interesting device. This device is iRobot Roomba® Vacuuming Robot. According to their site information - pretty smart and useful thing. Will test it today after charging will be complete (we’ve turned it on and it (or he?) went to the home base ans started chaging). All results will be posted here Stay tuned!

P.S. Here are some photos of it on its home base.

Hi, All! It’s been a long time without posts here, but next few months I’ll post really many information here. Why? Because:

1. I did CELPIP test (it is test like IELTS, but computerized and could be done only by Canada residents).
2. We’re going to apply for permanent residence really soon.
3. We’re going to prolong my work permit next month.
4. We think about moving to Toronto (from Brampton) and I’ll describe this process thoroughly.
5. We are going to visit Ukraine this spring, but there are lots of questions about obtaining new visa.
6. We did some research about apartments pricing in Toronto and about mortgage in Canadian banks.

So, stay tune and you’ll get lots of interesting information about live in Canada.