Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Mark Twain
Well
after lots and lots (and I mean lots)
of planning, it’s about time to start the biggest journey of my life: moving to
London. I first decided I wanted to move there after my first visit, back in
summer 2007. I was sixteen at the time, so that wasn’t going to happen
immediately. I returned the following summer, where I heard from two Canadians
staying with my aunt about a special visa for Canadian youths. This peaked my
interest – and my idea’s feasibility – because until then I thought the only
way I’d be allowed to live in England was through company sponsorship. The Tier
5 Youth Mobility Visa solved that problem for me. And so I started planning.
About two years after that, a friend of mine told me about SWAP. It’s a
Canadian program that facilitates the visa application process, specifically,
the Tier 5 Youth Mobility one. It’s more expensive than just getting the Visa
on your own, but they check all your documents and offer a lot of things that
you wouldn’t get by doing it on your own. Eventually my friend Sarah decided
she was as crazy as me and decided to join in on the adventure. It’s awesome
because now all the stress and confusion I have to go through before and after
the visa application process, I can share with else. We leave for England April
1st. And here is how we got here (in case you ever think you may
want to do something similar):
Step 1
After
much examination of the SWAP website (www.swap.ca),
we bothered to see if there was any actual offices for us to visit. Lo and
behold, there was a Travel Cuts (who is partnered with SWAP) at our university.
So, more than a year before we would actually apply), we went and talked to
them. Our travel agent for the entire process was Danielle Bruce and she is a
goddess. Not only has she done lots of travelling, she’s been in the industry
for over a decade and really knows her stuff. She gets excited with you and
gets almost as frustrated as you are when things aren’t going right. If you are
planning a trip and live in Calgary, go see her at the university, or give her
a call at 1-403-282-7687, or email her at dbruce@travelcuts.com
.
At our
first meeting with her, since it was so far in advance, we basically wanted to
just get a sense of what the process was like and what to expect. You can apply
with SWAP either on their website or through an affiliated agency like Travel
Cuts. After this meeting, we knew we wanted to deal with Danielle. There’s
something reassuring about being able to communicate with an actual person,
rather than the internet. Sure, we had to put pants on and drive and pay for
parking but it’s worth it when you think of something in the middle of talking
about something else and there’s a person – not a computer – right in front of
you with the answer. Like I said, we weren’t flying for another year, so we had
what we needed and waited to go back closer to our departure date.
Step 2
The
SWAP website says you need to give yourself about eight weeks to go through the
process. Originally, Sarah and I planned on going in January, immediately after
graduating university. When we returned to Danielle, we learned that was not
going to happen. I was going to New York at the end of October, while both
Sarah and I were headed to Mexico for New Year’s. We were told that if
everything went right we would maybe have our passports back before Mexico. But
that was a pretty big gamble so we decided to hold off until we got back.
If you’re
wondering why we didn’t just put our applications in earlier, it’s because you
can’t leave the country after you submit your initial application to SWAP. We
could pay the fee but that was about it, otherwise I would have broken the protocol,
even though you don’t surrender your passport until much later.
Step 3
Back from Mexico, Sarah and
I once again returned to Danielle. The first thing you hand over is a short
form to register with SWAP. It’s pretty basic questions like your name,
address, citizenship, etc. You also pay your fee. At the time we registered it
was $630. Ours was cheaper because we did not need accommodation. Even if you
get the package with accommodation, however, they only give you a couple days
in a hostel. Not worth it, in my opinion. The cost went up a few weeks after
Sarah and I paid, because the Canadian dollar is the devil and agencies are
having to increase the cost of just about everything to make up for how low it
is.
Step 4
We were
told it would take roughly 2-3 days for SWAP to email us all the forms we
needed to fill out. Surprisingly, we got them the next morning. The email has
four attachments.
A welcome letter from SWAP that also has a
step-by-step guide for filling out the application. It is very, very specific.
Sarah and I both went back to it several times to check some information,
almost always finding the answers.
A note about travel insurance. With SWAP you absolutely
have to have travel insurance in very specific amounts. They seem daunting (it’s
something like $5 million in medical) but I guess it’s pretty standard amounts.
SWAP recommends a form of insurance with Travel Cuts, but you can use your own.
You just have to fill out a form and send it to them.
A short part of your visa application. In order
to quality you obtain points. You need fifty. They are given in three sections:
Citizenship, Age and Money. You have to be a citizen of a handful of countries,
between 18 and 30, and have the equivalent of £1800 in your bank account. You
also have to specify the documents you will be providing the British government
to prove this. For Sarah and myself, we used our passports as proof of
citizenship and age, and obtained letters from our bank, RBC, to prove our
funds. This form does not get submitted to SWAP. You bring it to your VAC
appointment later.
The main application form. It is very long and
very comprehensive. It asks about everything from your basic information to
incredibly specific travel history. For me, travel history was the most difficult.
There’s two parts to it. In the first, you list your last five visits to the United
Kingdom. You must provide dates and everywhere you visited (so try and remember
your little day trips). The second, most evil, part of the travel history was a
list of everywhere you’ve gone outside of Canada in the last decade. I travel a
lot. I filled two pages. You must specify exact dates, as well as where you
were and why you were there. And I’m pretty sure with a travel history as
extensive as mine, ‘holiday’ just won’t cut it. So if I went for a concert, I
listed concert. If I had any family living where I went and happened to see them,
I listed visiting family. It was exhausting.
Tip: If you have a lot of dates, like me,
go through your Facebook timeline. I found every date I left and returned all
the way back to 2007 because I always post a status about leaving and about
returning. For pre-Facebook I had to start improvising. We went through home
videos and photographs. At one point I asked my aunt to check a date on a
postcard. My dad even went through his golf score cards to figure out when we
were in Florida!
Step 5
After
finishing all the forms we took them back to Danielle to courier to SWAP in
Toronto. Technically, we could have submitted them a day after we got them. We
ended up waiting several weeks. As I’ve mentioned before, the Canadian dollar
is terrible. The year before, £1800 was about $2800-2900 Canadian. By the time
we were filling out our forms it was switching between $3200-3400, depending on
the day. It was a nightmare. It’s a lot of money for two recent university
graduates. We were finding ourselves constantly counting our money down to the
last cent and it was getting stressful. Ultimately we decided to wait for one
more paycheck, even though it meant we would be in Calgary longer.
Once
your forms are sent to SWAP they fill out the online application and lodge it
with the British government. At that point they know you exist. You must
have £1800 in either a checking or savings account on this day and you can no
longer leave the country.
Step 6
After the application was lodged
Sarah and I received emails from the government, giving us our next steps.
First, we needed to get our bank letter. With SWAP, they want to check your
letter to make sure it’s correct prior to your VAC appointment. There’s a lot
of very specific things. When I went into my branch I had printed off both the
checklist and sample letter provided by SWAP. They were very helpful, even if
they weren’t too sure what I was asking for. Some of it is very straight-forward
(your name and address, for example) but it gets tricky when you must specify
the date. My application was lodged on February 10th but I didn’t go
to the bank until the 12th. My letter had to say the money was in my account on the 10th. I
explained it very clearly it needed to have that date – not the day I closed my
tax-free savings, not the day I came in – and they did as I asked. I emailed my
letter to SWAP and they gave it the OK.
It was at this step that we were
very grateful for choosing SWAP. Sarah got her letter done at another bank and
when she emailed the letter to SWAP, they told her it was incorrect. So she had
to go back. No big deal, except if we didn’t have SWAP checking it for us, that
would have been the letter submitted to the government – and then lead to the
rejection of her visa application. More money, more waiting, and a situation I
don’t think anyone wants to deal with.
Step 7
About a week after our
application was lodged, Sarah and I had to pay a visit to the VAC (Visa
Application Center). There’s only a few in Canada, so we had to drive up to
Edmonton. We almost died because Alberta has messed up weather. Somehow,
against all odds, we made it to our appointments on time. It is here that you
surrender your passport, any old passports (or a letter explaining why you don’t
have them), the visa application SWAP lodged, the bank letter and photocopies
of everything (just in case). You also have to get a photo taken (something to
do with facial recognition) and fingerprints.
Basically, biometric testing. It is at this point that you put
everything in an envelope and mail it to New York. And wait.
Step 8
They
tell you it takes 15 business days for the passport and visa to come back to
you, which is three weeks. Because you’re with SWAP, it goes to their offices
in Toronto first before getting couriered to your travel agent. This feels like
the longest 15 days in the world. After 10 business days Sarah and I received
emails saying our visas were approved. I emailed Danielle to see what the next
step was. She emailed SWAP.
Now, between the time Sarah and
I mailed out our passports and when we got approved, the VACs all got bought
out by another company. We thought we were lucky, like when the SWAP rates
changed weeks after we registered. Now you have to pay $115ish at the VACs,
where before it was free. When SWAP got back to Danielle, they told her that
because of this transition, our passports would be shipped directly to us. So
we waited. And waited. And waited. A week went by and we were getting worried.
I emailed Danielle again, who told me that if we didn’t have them back by
Friday (10 business days from our first email) SWAP would look into it. We didn’t
have them back by Friday but it appeared SWAP had taken the initiative and
looked into it for us before then. Just as I was logging in to my email to
inform Danielle of this, she emailed me to say that SWAP found our passports. The
British government had held onto the passports during the transition. By
Tuesday, our passports had already been to Toronto and were now back in
Calgary.
Step 9
Wednesday we made our last trip
to see Danielle. We got our passports, with the visas glued inside. All that
was left was to get plane tickets and travel insurance. We both chose to go
with the Bon Voyage travel insurance offered by Travel Cuts. A one year Plan B
(all the required insurance but without baggage or passport insurance), good
anywhere but the United States, cost us $432. If we had taken Plan A it would
have been over $700. Either option with the inclusion of the United States
would have been over $800.
As for flights, we ended up not
using Danielle. We wanted to, but the flight we found that we liked was
online-only, which meant she couldn’t get it for us. We had initially been
hoping to use www.canadianaffair.ca
but they only fly on Saturdays and it wasn’t a significant enough price
difference for us to change our minds. Our flight was $662 and direct. What is
even better is that it leaves at 10:00pm, and we will be tired. It gets to London
at 1:55pm. What does that mean? We don’t have to stay up as long and might have
been able to sleep a bit on the plane! Instead of trying to keep yourself the
entire day to fight off jetlag, we can get through customs, to where we’re
staying and it will be around 4:00pm. Grab an early supper, put on a movie and
9:00pm will come soon enough. (I find that if you stay up until 9 or 10 you
will pretty much beat jet lag.)
Honorary Step
Have a goodbye party! Our mutual
friend organized a goodbye party for Sarah and myself. It happened several
weeks before we left. It seems early but in the last few weeks you’ll find
yourself so busy you will be glad you did it. Ours was perfect. We started out
having dinner at a restaurant called The Keg, which is the place Sarah and I
always go out to eat together. There were about twenty people at dinner. We had
a good time talking and eating and drinking. It’s basically a fancier way to pregame.
We have many friends who don’t like nightclubs, so it was also a good plan for
people who had plans later or just didn’t feel like going out.
After the restaurant we went to Roadhouse,
which is the club in Calgary Sarah and I go to the most. We had the VIP room
which meant there was a separate place for us to keep our stuff, complete with
places to sit. You have to go downstairs if you want drinks or to dance, but I
love the VIP room. We also had a party package which gave us $25 drink
certificates and two bottles of champagne. There was about 30 people at the
club (some people only came to that part which made up for the people who left
after dinner).
So What Now?
Once our passports got back to
SWAP in Toronto we were registered for BritBound. It’s basically another
version of SWAP, except located in the UK and not exclusively for Canadians. You
don’t have to be with SWAP to use BritBound – they offer several packages for
people new to the United Kingdom for different prices. We received the Hit the
Ground Running package as part of our arrangement with SWAP. We haven’t exactly
used them yet but it looks like they
are a good bargain. Again, it’s important we have actual live people to deal
with and, with an office in Shoreditch, BritBound will do that. They also have
an orientation meeting that I’m really looking forward to and – what I didn’t know
– a traditional pub lunch, which I think is a pretty cool idea.
So we’re on to the last few
steps (and days) before England – so what do we have to do now? FILL OUT MORE
FORMS OF COURSE! BritBound has a massive form you need to fill out. It is
really confusing at first. It took me a few visits to their website to get it
all done. Some of it is easy, like saying when you’re flying. Some of it is
daunting, like the employment section. And some of it doesn’t make any sense, at
least at first, like setting up your Bank Account and Money Transfer, and a SIM
card for your phone. As it turns out, you don’t need to have everything done
right up until confirmation of your bank appointment for your BritBound forms to
be considered finished. Which was nice, once we realized it. I’m still
absolutely happy we used SWAP/BritBound but there definitely needs to be more
clarity on the forms.
Oh well, it’s an adventure?
