Here at home this year's Halloween was a lot of fun. It was Alice's second year in trick or treating and she couldn't be more energized to start on Saturday night, when all the street kids go out and go home and get candy. Diana was just getting the kids home and wasn't scared by costumes or anything. Our Halloween decoration this year was simple, but I already bought the utensils to work the pumpkins next year. Here in Canada, Halloween is not only treated as a somber event, especially among younger children. Most of the kids go costumed as characters and not needed zombies, witches and monsters, which I…

Today is election day in Canada and as (recent) citizens we voted for the first time in this country. It is offered the option to vote before the date too (2 weeks ago), what is called here "advanced polls", and that's what we did to avoid possible queues. Here in Canada, voting is not mandatory and can only be done by Canadian citizens over the age of 18 (permanent residents not included). If you are registered to vote, you receive a voter's information card with your number and place of voting. And the vote is not electronic, it's all on paper! Modernities (#sóquenão) of the first world! I'm no expert…

I start today's post thanking those who participated there by FB and suggested topics for this commemorative post, since it is 8 years in Canadian lands and did not want to write, although totally true, as it went fast so far, while we did so many things that seems like an eternity since we left Brazil. I dug up some pictures from the bottom of the chest for this post, as we change in 8 years! On the day of our departure from Brazil, still in São Paulo… Today, Canada for us no longer has all that mystery when we arrived. The land where we didn't know the people properly,…

I recently learned of the online tool called Navut and what a great discovery! You have access to hundreds of data (if not more) from almost every major Canadian city (Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg), which can make a big difference when choosing a city to live in and the right neighborhood for You. So I thought about what hand on the wheel navut would have been at the time we were in the polls before coming to Canada. We did a very basic survey, I would say, of Edmonton and Ottawa and ended up choosing Ottawa, but I confess that we arrived here very lost, knowing nothing…

Just as I talked about the pros earlier, I couldn't help but quote the cons of immigrating to Canada, because yes, they exist and aren't that few. For some the items below may not bother as much, as for others, they can be decisive points to come or not to come. I believe that most of the most challenging and "less good" things about coming to live in these bands end up weighing more after the person arrives and sees, in fact, that the bixo picks up anywhere in the world. The best thing is to try to imagine these points in a day-to-day and long term future and assess…