I’ve realised just how much I’ve written in this weblog over the past few months, and the silly thing is, we haven’t even left yet. Heaven help me when we actually arrive in Canada! I’m wondering if I’ll be writing more or less… I hope I continue to keep the blog current by adding to it regularly, since I do quite enjoy looking back over it. Perhaps there may be one or two folk out there who also enjoy reading it, but to be honest, I am mainly doing if for my own selfish reasons as much as for any possible audience. Notwithstanding all that, if there really are people out there who will benefit from reading through my ramblings, it would most likely be future exchangees. It’s good to get insights from people who have already done what you’re about to do… it’s the old story about going through a minefield by following the footsteps of the person in front of you.

One of the reasons I’ve bothered to write as much of the pre-trip stuff as I have, is that if you are planning to go on exchange you need a lot of this information before you go. By far the best thing we did was to establish a solid open line of communication between the Graces and ourselves. Yeah, email is good, but I think the use of MSN Messenger and Skype has played a big part in ensuring that we keep the lines of communication open. And with Skype’s ability to phone a landline for next to nothing, you can also use it to make almost free calls to the other county. For example, this morning I had to ring the Halton District School Board to check on the documentation process for Donna to get some teaching work. I could have done it with email, but I like to actually talk to people so I used Skype to call them. When you’re paying less than 2 cents a minute it doesn’t seem such an issue when they put you on hold for a couple of minutes! Of course the other useful aspect of blogging early is that I've become quite cluey about Blogger and the way it works, and I've refined the best ways to include photos and stuff, as well as making modifications to the page template. I'm sure I could have worked all that out later, but I think I'll have better things to do once we arrive in Oakville...

Anyway, keep an eye out for more useful tips hidden amongst my ramblings…