Joanna Stich

It’s been awhile; I am back to “the land of living” you could say. Well, I’ve been around I’ve just been so busy with a completely new career path in Ireland, starting my own little Virtual venture called Instant Assistant Ireland which you can check out here. To top it all off, we decided to throw everything we’ve worked for “away” and try new life somewhere else. Where is this somewhere else? Vancouver. Canada hasn’t seen me yet, ha!

Basically, I knew I was never going to stay in Ireland for good, I mean we got married and saved for a deposit for a house only to realize that once we had enough money to put down the deposit we couldn’t bring ourselves to do so because we didn’t want to settle in Ireland! So here we are, by the method of elimination – I’ve always said I left my heart in NYC but the recent “regime” of Trump I wouldn’t even want to go near there and lets face it Australia is just too far, so here we are. But if you ask me, the flight from Amsterdam to Vancouver was 10 hours (longest one I’ve been on so far) and it was still too far for me! Even though I’d consider myself quite a good, relaxed flyer towards the end I was like just get me off the plane!!

We left our house in Clane at 3am Irish time, flight to Vancouver via Amsterdam was at 5.55am – 3 Hour layover in the ‘Dam followed by 10 hour flight to Vancouver. When we finally landed in Yvr it was approximately 10pm Irish time. We then proceeded to immigration to have our Work Permits issued – You don’t get the permits until you land and are physically there, at which point they can still turn you away with no explanation so you are literally putting all your eggs in the one basket! Immigration took 3 hours, followed by what should have been 20 minutes but turned out to be an hour train journey to the city. Totally happens when you don’t know where you’re going, its the middle of the snowstorm AND have 5 suitcases, 2 backpacks and a handbag between 2 people. At this stage it is now 2am Irish time the FOLLOWING day (6pm here) when we finally managed to get to the hotel after 25 minutes walk UPHILL with all the luggage in the snowstorm. [Side note: I’d sincerely like to thank all the strangers that offered to carry our luggage for us!].

We dumped our bags and got something to eat, fast-food nonetheless. Oh and did I mention I was flying over on 3 antibiotics and 8 steroids a day and had to wear a mask on our flight? Yeah, just a minor detail I missed.

Lets just say once I was fed, showered and in dry clothes I was the person my husband once married; and not the psycho he traveled with for 24 hours + . If this story was straightforward there would be nothing to tell the grand kids one day…. At least I can laugh about it now.

I’m going to leave it at that for today, I feel like so much has happened and there’s so much to say so maybe instead of running this as I previously did (even though I did have nice few perks and freebies) I might do it such as tell-all emigrant/immigrant (?) style diary for public eye. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will relate to this.

At the moment I can’t commit to how often I will be sharing on here, BUT I am still active probably even more than before on my Socials:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JoannaBStich

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/joanna.stich

So, say hi, keep up to date with my shenanigans and hopefully you guys will stick around while I navigate through this journey.

Joanna xo