About

This is me, Anton Samper Rivaya and this is my blog.  I’ve only decided to write this blog because I’m just about to embark on the craziest adventure of my life and I want to remember it forever.

Ok, so here is a very quick low down on what has happened so far from the beginning.  I moved to England from Spain when I was 10, I grew up here, learnt English, went to school, went to uni, met a girl (Katie), got a job, moved in with Katie, the roof in our flat fell down, so we moved again and this brings you up to speed up until October/November 2009.

One sunday in October/November, whilst drinking a cup tea and having a mid afternoon treat from M&S, Katie mentioned that she would love to do ski season in Canada and travel around the country. My first reaction as a Spanish man, was WTF! no heat?! but after a little thinking I starting coming round to the idea. This would be an experience that I myself would have never come up with, mix that in with the fact that I love change and doing new things and you have the perfect motivation to really start looking into things, and so I did.

By the time I really started to look into everything, Katie had already managed to work out that the best and easiest way to do it, it being legally working a ski season and traveling around canada, was to get a 1-year holiday working visa and if you are in the UK, the way to do this was to go through a company called BUNAC.

“Great I thought”, Katie has has registered and she now has a visa reserved, all she had to do was fill out a couple of forms, pay the for the visa and then get approved by the Canadian comission, “easy as 1-2-3″. And yes, it’s easy…. if you have a British passport.

Here is another quick low down of what happened next.  I applied to the BUNAC programme, got rejected because of my Spanish passport, tried calling the Canadian embassy in london, couldn’t help, contacted the Canadian embassy in Madrid, applied to a new pilot programme, was rejected because I didn’t live in Spain, got a refund, looked into other options, decided to look into becoming British….

(take a deep breath)

…so i did the citizenship test, passed, filled out the forms, gave evidence, got approved, had a ceremony, took an oath, got my certificate, applied for my passport, got my passport and finally sent all my BUNAC forms through, gave up my job and got approved by the Canadian comission and that is it.

So it took more or less a year but I finally got what I wanted, dual nationality and my ticket into Canada for a year.

Where to next? The blog and the gallery where I will be posting photos and videos of my adventures.

Anton

(big kiss, little kiss, big kiss)