some more (annoying) eccentricities

(To add to the ones detailed here)

I know it's only to be expected that things will be done differently in a different country, and I have no problem with that at all. Some things in Canada, however, definitely take some getting used to.

The first is the mobile phone situation. At home I paid £15 a month for unlimited texts and 300 minutes. Here, $15 a month gets you 50 (fifty!) texts and 50 minutes. I don't know anyone who can survive on 50 texts per MONTH, especially considering the next point: You have to pay to RECEIVE calls and texts. For me, this completely defeats the idea of paying for a phone. It just turns into a free-for-all: what if someone rings you as a wrong number and drains your last credit? What if someone on contract decides to send you a hundred texts and leech the lot? It's so flawed...

Phones here are about 10 years behind the UK aesthetically and price wise, too. The asking price for a phone comparable to the one I had 5 years ago is $70 (~£30), which although cheap, is still a lot. The only modern phones I've seen here are the iPhone and the Blackberry, though I must say these are similarly priced to home (too bloody expensive). You also have to pay a monthly fee to be able to ring the emergency services...

Despite this, I do intend to get a Canadian phone at some point.

Another confounding point: bank accounts limit your monthly transactions, and unless you're a student, OAP, or rich enough to maintain a $1500 minimum balance, you get charged monthly for having an account. The charge isn't much ($8 (~£5)) a month, but it still seems odd. It must work though because the Canadian banking system is one of the strongest in the world apparently, even during the recession.

The final of my rants, before I start to sound like a disgruntled rocking chair dweller, is regarding tax. A product's advertised price over here isn't what you pay for it: depending on the nature of the product, you either pay 0%, 5%, 8% or 13% tax on top. This confused me greatly the first time I went food shopping. Most food is seen as a necessity and so tax is waived, but I added 13% to everything and paid significantly less at the till than I expected. I then went shopping for toiletries and didn't add any tax thinking the same logic would apply, and got stung at the till.

The above points are here for educational purposes only; I thought people at home might like to know how things work over here. No way is applying basic mathematical knowledge here and there and having to read terms and conditions on phones more carefully going to hinder my time over here.