MiKE: Settling in, feeling poor.

After about a week here, I'm beginning to feel somewhat more optimistic, though at times there are moments of panic and depression, usually linked to the quickly diminishing wad of Canadian dollar bills, and the lack of sufficiently intimate human contact in this sea of people. No of course I am not talking about exchange of genetic information, or amylase containing solutions...

Like, for example, today, i was out shopping at Walmart. And I needed someone to give me the second opinion on what I should/ should not get. Nobody was there. Dinner? Alone. I always thought I was more of an introverted kind of person, and at least those MBTI kind of personality tests that I have taken have shown as much. But even so, I am now realizing just how much human contact I actually need. Which is not trivial, i'd say.

After the last blog entry, which was only about the first day, I managed to catch some sleep, 'reset the brain' a bit, to clear the mind, then went for a slightly less ambitious schedule, but still, managed to go bank rate shopping along Dundas St West, hopping, early in the morning from Bank of Montréal (at Bloor Street, first), which said that they would take 30 days to clear my cashier's cheque from Citibank Singapore (which therefore disqualified them from taking up my business), then to The Royal Bank of Canada, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Toronto Dominion Canada Trust, then eventually at Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation.

For those who know Toronto, Dundas Street West is a major East-West street, which I started walking from University Avenue, all the way to Spadina. Chinatown, happens to be more or less centered around the Dundas - Spadina junction, and it is there that HSBC has its Chinese/Cantonese speaking branch at Chinatown Centre. After going through the rest of the banks, it was a pretty no-brainer to open an HSBC account - they were offering a 5% promotion interest rate on their SAVINGS account.

But before I managed to get to a banker, since the receptionist (a senior looking Chinese person who spoke to me in Cantonese first) had asked me to either wait until past 3 as the bankers were all held up, I went for lunch, and visited the Vietnamese restaurant next door. This was quite welcome, as I only had a wrap from Starbucks in the morning with my latte, which cost all of $10, and nothing else to eat till about 3pm. So, as expected, I over-ordered, got myself the XL sized (Canadian XL, not Vietnamese XL) special beef noodles with soup, and 2 shrimp spring rolls:


And I could not finish the noodles, and had to pack one of the rolls, which I eventually ate about 11 pm on my way back from OISE to Canadiana. I was there late cos they have 24 hour free access to the computer services, which meant chatting and mail checking and whatever else one needs to do on a computer connected to the Internet.

Also on the same day, I managed to get myself a phone (a neat little Nokia 6300) and a phone plan with Fido, the competitor to Rogers (some tell me that Rogers owns Fido...) which did not stock many models of Nokias; also, I managed to meet Vincent, a Singaporean student studying sociology at the University of Toronto, and had dinner with him.

After being filled with Asian food, accomplishing some of the more pressing tasks that I needed to do, and meeting someone I could talk with natively, I began to feel somewhat better.