Part 1: From getting study permit till rushing to Airport.

My visa application was refused by Canadian visa office in Tehran for September 2006 and I’d almost given up. I just applied again for January for the sake of doing it.
I was in the middle of teaching a Petrel (Geological Modeling software) course to people from an oil company that my wife called me and told that I’ve been asked to go to Canadian Embassy in Tehran for interview. The day after I went there and had a short interview. 3 days later, I got my medical check up form. I noticed to my company that I am quitting. With a surprise my manager (Which is a very nice Afrikaner) started finding a competitive offer inside the company. In a few days I got an offer from UK. The last few weeks was sort of chaos. I was to finish my grade 11 project and at the same time I had to prepare myself for moving. The UK offer was so interesting that made me confused. As a result, I almost did nothing till two weeks before my flight when I got my visa. Thank God our area manager asked me to stop my grade 11 project because he believed if I am quitting there is no point of doing that. I got disappointed first but then I thought maybe this is just a gift. At least I could prepare myself for moving. Now I had to choose. The UK offer was not confirmed and we just on Christmas vacations. Almost nobody was working in UK. In the other hand I didn’t want to lose my chance of studying in Canada. Finally we decided to go for Calgary and let the UK thing go as it is till we get a clear offer.

In two weeks we start packing things, selling what we can’t take with us and managing our properties and a thousand of other tiny annoying but necessary stuff. The flights were almost full and we hardly managed to get a ticket for Jan 02. I tried a lot to find a ticket for a later time to make space for UK offer but no way had we found any other ticket. (Actually it was good and you’ll see why).

We had a couple of welfare parties in company, with our own firends and families.

We almost left half of our apartment full of our stuff for our family and rushed to flight in the morning of January the second! Our journey began. Maryam and I left our peaceful life in the hope of a better future.