Hi, everybody. Sorry for writing in English. I will appreciate if somebody dives me a link to Latin-Cyrillic converter.
We have been one month in Toronto now. We definitely like it being here, although our first weeks weren't easy. Our temporary accommodation was very inconvenient: it was a guest house kept by Chinese people. The location was very bad: far from the centre and from transportation, and there was no internet, although they promised. We had no choice but to rent a car to look for apartment to rent, as it was impossible to move around the city with a kid. There are plenty of apartments for rent. The prices are high, as you all know, and availability usually from the 1st of a month. Our goal was to move out of that guest house as soon as possible. We found apartment quite fast, within one week. The apartment is big and warm, with a great view from the 16th floor balcony, facing north. It's the Downtown, the intersection of Bloor and Parliament streets. The neighbourhood, I must admit, is not particularly clean and wealthy. A lot of tenants in our building are form India, Pakistan, Arabic countries... though many Chinese and few Europeans. This fact disturbed me at the beginning, but now I see that I have nothing to worry about: all those Indians and Pakistanis are quiet, obedient and polite people, although may be not quite intelligent and wealthy. The location is perfect: it's between two subway stations. And 10 minutes of walk from the very centre of Toronto.
First thing we did when we moved into our apartment we connected to the Internet. To have a telephone line took much longer — a whole week, due to either laziness, or irresponsibility (or both) of clerks in «Bell» — telephone company. Then we bought some home stuff (almost everything we bought in Ikea, and I definitely recommend it, as it's not expensive and stylish). And now we are looking for jobs.
It's not a very good period now, before Christmas and a New Year, there are not many vacancies neither in the newspapers, nor in the Internet, the whole Toronto seems to be concentrated on coming holidays.
As I see it now, it won't be easy to get a first job, as they want Canadian experience. And this is regarding not only IT fields. I am a secretary, and I applied for all clerical/office assistance positions. I didn't receive any response to my resume so far.
But it's O'K, everything will be just fine, I'm sure of it, we only have to try harder.
We went skating. It was great! We went to museums: Scientific Centre and Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). It was really good (!); we enjoyed it so much as well as our 3-years-old son. There are whole departments dedicated to kids, where they can touch everything, play and learn all kinds of things. It's great for all ages.
There are plenty of places with live music, exhibitions, concerts, books presentations... in short cultural life is very, very rich. But one needs to have job to participate in all this, as almost nothing is free. There are more expensive places, and there are less expensive ones, but almost everything costs some money, and if you are jobless...
There are plenty of choices to spend A New Year night. May be someone can give an advice where to go.(?)Mind that we have a kid who goes with us.