A year already

So today marks the first anniversary of my arrival in Canada.

Wow. It doesn't feel anywhere near that long.

If you're keeping track, by the way, in order to maintain my Permanent Resident status, I need to renew the visa every five years. (I know - it's not the definition of permanent I use, either.) I need to be present in the country for 730 days in each five year period. My current visa started on the 3rd August 2011, and I'm currently up to about 355 days, thanks to my brief stay then and a couple of trips outside of Canada. To apply for citizenship, it's 1095 days over a four year period.

After this long, there's still a couple of things that catch me by surprise:

- when a car is on a red light, they can (generally) turn right still. This helps a lot with traffic flow, but as a pedestrian, when I have a Walk sign, I really don't want to see cars driving in front of me. They're supposed to give me priority, but you don't really want to trust that they're going to.

- paying tax at the till. Of course, it doesn't help that it's not a flat rate - that just makes it harder to work out in my head. The current rate is 13%, so when you buy most things, the price you pay is going to be 13% more than the price on the tag. From experience, it looks like the tax rate on food you prepare yourself is zero - I know, it's like they're encouraging healthy eating using the tax code - and books is 5% (I'm imagining your surprise that I know that.) But even after a year, I'm still not used to seeing something on the shelf for $4.99 and not being able to pay for it was a $5 bill.