Immigration Canada

Our immigration story is much like any other – Canadian guy meets Swedish girl, they fall in love, and she comes back to Canada with him. They try to make everything legal so she can stay, and the government gives them a hard time. That simple.

We’ve been together several years now. We met in Europe when I was living in Germany working as a web designer for a company in Frankfurt. We had talked online several times (She was living in Budapest, Hungary) and we decided we should meet up. I took a night train to Budapest for a long weekend and we met in person for the first time. The rest, as they say, is history.

She was Swedish, living in Hungary, but studying at a university in New York. She was at home with her parents in Budapest during the summer of that year, which is why we had the chance to meet up finally.

Then, September 11 happened. Her school was very close to ‘ground zero’ and so needless to say she was a little freaked out about it all. She decide she would just finish the semester in New York and then go back to be with her family in Budapest.

By the end of that year I had returned back to Canada for a few months, and then went back to the same job in Germany in the beginning of 2002. Mainly because then we would be closer. It was still a long haul between the two places (Frankfurt – Budapest) but manageable. We traveled back and forth and I would normally take a night train all the way there and back over a weekend, usually every two weeks.

In the meantime we had decided that she could finish her university studies in Canada. She applied to several universities across Canada and finally was accepted to a university in British Columbia. So, we went through the paperwork and all of that, and moved out to BC once she got her student visa. That went with relative ease.

Applying for a permanent resident visa is a whole other story though..And the purpose of this blog. We hope our journey through the red-tape laden Canadian immigration process will help others in the same position.