Still balmy. No breeze.

Location : Toronto Airport, right by my terminal, which is wonderfully close to a Tim’s. I can smell the caffeine.

Time: 5:05pm.

Date : 8^th November 2010

Weather : a balmy room temperature with a slight breeze from an air vent. Perfect for typing if I do say so myself.

Greetings Blog readers! Guess who finally made a start to their journey! Right now I am sitting in the Toronto Airport, not a bad location. Except I can not for the life of me connect to the internet. And my backpack is wayyyyy too heavy for me to be getting up to ask someone for assistance any time soon. So here it is; one of the first of many to come, blog entries, written on Microsoft Word and saved for later. Just like the Boston Cream donut’s cream on my lovely scarf…

Thus far into this adventure today there isn’t much to recount. All I’ve really done is fly to Toronto. Which really wasn’t all that exciting.

Some of you who came to the airport this morning to wish me off and catch one last real life glimpse of me may be wondering about the crying baby I had to sit beside. As soon as we levelled out some thousand (maybe only hundreds?) feet in the air, we were both relatively quiet.. fast asleep.

Y’all may have heard a lil bit about my troubles and the French Consulate. Since I have nothing better to do right now, I’ll lay it down for ya;

            Way back in August when I first applied for my visa I was thinking it would come in the mail a short week or two after. That was not so. Not at all. I waited for three weeks until heading off to Toronto to visit them in person to fully submit my application. And do a little sight seeing with my Dad.

            Then the wait began.

            To be fair, I was missing some documents. Some had to be sent back to France to be signed, which took nearly a month to be returned to me, but I promptly had them sent away to Toronto in with double express envelopes (one to get my stuff to Toronto, and another within to get my Visa and passport back ASAP).

            I was expecting, again, too much of either the French Consulate or Canada Post, or both, or probably just the Consulate, and I started to worry. The total days of worry lasted from a Tuesday until Monday, when I got The E-Mail.

            Oh The E-Mail. When I saw that the Consulate had made an appearance in my inbox I was thrilled. One click later my world came crashing down and days of going in and out of my Stress Comas ensued.  What The E-Mail said that my visa had been approved, but the French language course I had to take (which is scheduled to begin in January 2011) was problematic since the date did not coincide with my November arrival in France. Please note that before slipping into a Stress Coma I fired off an email expressing my frustrations.

            See, nowhere on the French Embassy site does it specify that the dates have to coincide. Their defence was that they do state that they may need “any other additional documents” aka they just made themselves a HUGE loop hole that I can in no way argue.

            I began planning my life out for another couple months in Saskatoon. Started looking into getting more shifts for the next week at my two jobs, took a Food Safety course so I could get a better job.

            For some reason, on Thursday, I decided to check out the status of the Express envelope I had sent to the Consulate. The weirdest thing I discovered; the envelope had been processed the previous day in a Toronto post office.

            Becoming guarded for a hard let down, they had either sent my passport back, my visa (with my passport) or neither of the two.

            Waiting merely a day  with antici..     …pation, sure enough my visa came in the mail on Friday.

            And now, here I am. On my way.

            The only thing stressing my mind is the fact that I gotta hoist my backpack on again soon.

            For some reason I always remind myself of a pack mule…

            I mean.. a graceful and beautiful cat. Like Sheba. So majestic. 

            Tim Horton’s is calling me for one last coffee.

            Peace out Canada,

            Stay Classy.

5:35 pm. Still balmy. No breeze.

Toronto Airport at Sunset