Sep 9 2008
iPhone
Yup, today I signed my life away.
After my lamenting about the outrageous cost of the iPhone in Canada I thought I would never buy one. Maybe an iPod touch (which is basically an iPhone that can’t make calls) but no iPhone.
But today my eye fell on a leaflet that announced a special deal: a voice plan for only $17.50 per month. It includes 200 minutes per month which is plenty for someone who almost never calls. I asked if I could use that as my iPhone plan, and just add a $30 data plan to it? The sales rep had to ask his superior, but then told me that that was indeed a possibility.
One of the reasons I didn’t use my previous ‘Pay-as-you-Go’ phone is that every call was outrageous expensive. That will change now, because I’ve already paid for those minutes. (I don’t know what will happen when I don’t use all those 200 minutes per month; will they roll over to the next month or are they just gone? I have to look that up.)
Of course Rogers adds some ridiculous fees to it but in total my monthly bill will be less than $65 including all taxes and fees. Over the course of the 3-year contract that will still be more than $2300 but it is substantially less than the $5700 I had calculated previously.
I had some problems setting things up (they sent me an email with a temporary voice mail password that was not correct), and my data connection stopped working after a few hours, so I spent some time on hold with Rogers’ Tech Support, but it works pretty well now. Of course I can spent hours and hours tweaking settings and installing applications (like a Twitter and Facebook client, so I can stay totally in the loop) but I’ll try to spread that out over a couple of days.
[From the photo it’s obvious the camera doesn’t like our yellow walls in low-light.]
Update: All minutes you didn’t use in a month are gone. Use it or lose it. So the 9 cents per minute I pay now, might become 35¢/min when I don’t call a lot. How is that in other countries? How you are supposed to keep track of your minutes is unclear. My iPhone has a usage counter, but it also counts all the long calls to Rogers’ support help line. Four of those calls today, totalling more than one hour. Most of it spent on hold, (yay for speakerphone!) but my call was dropped twice. That seems to be an iPhone problem, hopefully fixable with software. My calls to tech support were about the unused minutes (no mention at all about this on the website), and about visual voicemail (they had sold me the wrong add-on plan; the first month is free, after that I’m going to cancel it anyway but I want to see how it works.)
I installed a lot of apps and deleted some of them after I tried them. The only application I bought was an iPhone version of my ToDo-list application. They talk to eachother to keep things synchronised.
Sep 11 2008
Landed
I missed the 5 year anniversary of loglog on the first of September. My first post on loglog —which I wrote in Dutch back then— was about the preparations for my move to Canada. I moved 11 days later, on September 11, 2003 and that date was not chosen by coincidence.
Without the events of September 11, 2001 I probably wouldn’t have been in Montréal today. I was in Toronto that day, investigating if I could relocate to Canada. My plan was to spend a 3 month period to see how living in Toronto would be and to find out if there would be any work for me.
I had just attended the wedding of Dolph and Mansa, a Dutch friend-of-a-friend of mine and his Canadian wife, and the first couple of weeks I could stay in their apartment while they were away on their honeymoon. The apartment was on the 14th floor in the flight-path of Pearson airport and I could actually see the pilots when they started their landing.
The morning of the attacks on the WTC, I was checking my email when I received an email that a plane had hit a building in New York. I ran to the TV and ten seconds after I turned it on I saw the plane hit the tower. I thought it was a replay but from the commentary I soon understood it was a second plane. I didn’t stop watching TV that day. New York City felt so close, even though I had never been there.
The week after that Toronto, with some sort of delusion of grandeur, was afraid to be the next target. No planes were landing anymore, the CN-tower was closed and I was all alone in a foreign city with nobody to talk to. My meetings with prospective employers were cancelled and I decided this was just not the right time for a try-out. I already hated it for its americanism and urban sprawl, and now everybody was very tense and it was even worse. I wanted to go home.
Dolph, coming back from his honeymoon, convinced me to pay Montréal a visit before I would fly back to the Netherlands. He said it was good to just experience Montréal so I could decide if it was worthwhile to come back later.
And so I travelled on the train to Montréal with all my luggage. Way too much luggage.
When I arrived in Gare Centrale and schlepped my luggage from the railway station to the Metro ówho designed all those narrow passages and stairs?ó I noticed the atmosphere was so different than in Toronto. It was more European, the people friendlier and less stressed and I felt like in a warm bath. I spent two nearly sleepless nights in a youth hostel and met a guy there who knew a place were you could rent a room per month. I decided to stay a little longer than originally planned. I got myself a small room, installed telephone and ordered an internet connection. All for only one month, but I wanted to see how it would be to live in this city, and not just being a tourist.
Via my Internet connection I kept in contact with friends in the Netherlands, with some clients and even did some programming work for a client in Montréal. But I didn’t know anybody and felt rather lonely, so I put up an ad on an Internet dating site.
Alison was the only person that replied. We met for lunch and she fell in love with me over a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. My first bagel ever.
Partly because the encounter with Alison I ended up staying for almost two months in Montréal. While waiting almost two years for my visa I visited many times. In the end of August 2003 I finally got the green light and it was not a hard decision to pick September 11, 2003 as the date of my official arrival in Canada as a landed immigrant. Just to make that date a bit less evil; to give it also a positive side.
Since then lots of things have happened. I wrote about some of them on loglog, but many things I kept to myself. Sometimes because I was too lazy, sometimes because I didn’t feel like it and sometimes for such trivial reasons as lacking a suitable photo.
Five years in Montréal is a good occasion to make up the balance. What is my current life compared to what it was 5 years ago? What has changed? What is still the same? Which of my expectations have come true? Which haven’t?
I’ll write about that in the next post.
That post may contain Too Much Information, in which case you should just skip it. It also might just vanish from this site someday, in which case I got either second thoughts, cold feet or was abducted by aliens.
By mare • english, montréal, story, travel •