Travelling as a Canadian

Something we take for granted a lot as Canadians, I think, is our ease and ability to travel wherever we want. It is a privilege to have our passports looked at as a respected document with no hassle or issues. For me it was really easy to travel to places before, not even thinking about if I needed a visa or paperwork to get into a country. I guess it can sometimes be quite a process.

In Europe, I could go to any country I wanted. I still found it hard to believe that I didn’t need any sort of visa or paperwork to be in Ukraine for up to three months. Canada and a few other countries had exemptions. Other interns that were working had to travel all the way to their capital and wait, sometimes a few days, to get all their paperwork together. A lot of them couldn’t travel to any other countries because they only had single entry visas. It was really expensive for them too, up to $300. In a way it made me feel guilty because I had no required paperwork.

Other Ukrainians couldn’t believe that I could just leave and enter the country when I wanted. In order for them to go into other countries in Europe, they need a special visa. They can only travel to Russia freely. I would need a visa for Russia. A lot of people need to get a letter of invitation from someone in the country where they want to travel before they are allowed to go there. I was in Czech Republic when Canada was implementing visa requirements for Mexicans and Czechs because of the high number of refugee claims. I remember when we were in Northern Ireland and Fadi had issues going from the United Kingdom into Ireland, and in Cuba when none of the citizens could even leave the country.

While getting the paperwork ready to be in Korea for a year I can now see the hassle behind getting visas when you want to travel places. It was an insane amount of paperwork and documents to get together. We needed to send a ton of stuff to Korea first, like university transcripts, a resume, photos, a notarized copy of our degree and the original degree. Then we got our visa number back from Korea, and had to send a ton more stuff with it to the consulate in Montreal. It was a very expensive and time consuming process, especially since I was in Ukraine for a lot of it and was having trouble getting things like my criminal record check from the RCMP.

Now we’re here and have to go and get a multiple entry visa in order to travel to places, and apply for more visas like China or North Korea. I’m hoping we do get to go into North Korea, it would be really cool to visit this secretive nation. I’m also looking forward to visiting places with more exemptions for Canadians though, like Japan.