Ejector Seat

It could be worse, I might be writing you from a prison cell on P.E.I....no, not I.M. Pei. As far as I know, Prince Edward Island is not Canada's answer to Alcatraz, but I have much to learn about this land up north of the USA, where I landed on Thursday June 22 with enough baggage to move here, a suspicion that got me in trouble at the border.

Nice Border Agent: "So, 173 days in Canada, what brings you here for so long, eh?"
Me: "To visit my girlfriend for a very long time...eh?!"
Perhaps Nice B.A.: "Do you have a job?"
Me: "I just quit one."
Rigid B.A.: "So, are you moving here?"
Me: (yes, but I know I need a job first, but I will do that while I am here, but do I tell YOU that, or just lie, can't lie, what IS the truth at this point?...need water...) "Oh nooooo."
Scowling B.A.: "Then why does it say here that you are sending two boxes of personal items?"
Me with massive drymouth: "Well, 173 dayth ith a long thime, I wanted to have my perthonal affecth....(oh boy)..."

The Border Agent then took my customs card and scribbled numbers in red, my eyes grew wider as he highlighted a few lines in fluorescent yellow, and the final mark of a huge diagonal line across both sides of the card in hot pink made my stomach turn. I had never seen so much writing on ANY customs card, ever. The dagger came as he pointed me down a long hallway and to a set of empty cubicles, in the complete opposite direction of where everyone else was walking. I had, indeed, not passed through customs.

After a lengthy interview with a pair of nice guys who asked me all the right rhetorical questions about work, how to get it, what I can and can't do while here, what I was going to do and had been doing before, and also at the end if I knew if Siemens sold its German phones here in the west or were they just sold 'over there,' I made it into a taxi and found my way to the Toronto.

So Canada, I have nothing to hide, but I can't answer all your questions without sitting down. You don't know that I shipped my "personal items" so I could fill my suitcases with my work, credentials, books, and notes on everything I know about getting here and staying here. But thinking about all of it while alone in California provided me my own answers to my own questions until I came face-to-face with real answers from real people, and to ask far more real questions in real-time.