I grew up in a family where our father taught us to do all the house-hold work ourselves on Sundays. We had servents for everything - but my father had made a rule that Sunday was a day to learn household chores like \\\"Jhadu\\\", \\\"phoncha\\\", ironing, dusting, cleaning doors and windows, cleaning toilets, \\\"atta pisai\\\" and things like that. I would say that I was one of the lucky ones to learn all those things at the young age of 10-12 years, without any real need for it.

One thing however I did not learn, because I was never made to learn since I had many sisters, and till a year back could not ever imagine that I will have to learn, was - COOKING!

But well, welcome to Canada! Last year my wife enrolled for a year long full time course in York U and she couldn't find time to eat, forget about cooking! And so came the day when I picked up the knife, peeler and started with cooking vegetables. Initially, I could not remember what masala has to be put in what quantity (except may be salt and lal mirch), but slowly I learned to cook a few vegetables, and bought out naans from Indian stores. And slowly got fed up of naans day in day out, and so had to go for chapatis.

While I have almost perfected cooking some vegetables, chapatis are still in shapes of australia or america and sometimes as crisp as papad! So I have improvised on it.....I now roll out a very big one (whether australia or america or africa) and then use the lid of the \"masaldaan\" to cut a perfect round shape!

What I want to signify is that Canada does not only teach you how to lift heavy loads (both at home and in factories), but it teaches you various other things that we never thought we ever would need to. It can be things like cooking for males, car driving and jobs for ladies, school bus driving for a qualified engineer etc. etc.

I invite members to share such experiences of AQUIRING NEW SKILLs, not really by choice but by majboori, and how are they able to deal with it now in life. For me, I think I learned a new skill which I should have learned long back - though not necessarily I enjoy it!

This topic might not only bring out some interesting stories, but perhaps help wannabe immigrants on some of the other necessities of Canadian lifestyle and expectations.

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Chandresh

Advice is free – lessons I charge for!!

New immigrant automatically learns new skills here like cab driving, dealing with real estate, loading/unloading of various things, factory work, counter help, etc. out of compulsion and not out of choice. When you do not recognize the qualification and experience of a person from India, what he/she will do? You can either go back to India or do all these things and stay here. The major problem is also that people spend Rs 1.5-2 Lakhs or more to come to Canada if you put in all the costs of high commission fees, consultant fees, IELTS, etc. Some stay here just to recover their money and then go back.

All immigrants cannot afford to study here. It is very expensive compared to India.

Here there is more demand of people in something similar to our ITIs like electrician, carpenter, plumber, heating and air conditioning mechanics, tool and die makers, truck and bus drivers, etc., and they earn good money too.

I think everybody irrespective of gender should learn cooking. It would help someday or other. In India, women do not generally allow men to enter kitchen for doing cooking. I learned cooking from my wife 15-20 days before I came to Canada. There is http:// http://www.bawarchi.com" rel="nofollow">LINK for help too!

The location where I live does not have an Indian store nearby and I really miss that. I have to spend $4.50 to go there and come back by bus and it takes a lot of time waiting for buses, especially in the afternoons. Bus service here is worst on weekends.

Buying a car here is also a compulsion. Car could help you getting jobs, going to jobs at odd hours, going to groceries and Indian stores, going out on weekends, doing overtime in office after odd hours, etc. My colleague used to say I do overtime for the car(cost for keeping a car, he spends about $500 a month on car).

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add plumbing (i know how that flush works) ...anybody here used a plumbers snake?...yuuuuuk!!!, landscaping, furniture assembly, roof gutter cleaning to the list of things I picked up.
My parents who were visiting were also pleasantly surprised that I mopped and cleaned the floors and washrooms at my home. I prefer that to kitchen work. Though after lots of effort and patience from my wife I finally know how to make tea and coffee



BTW: My snow removal guys failed to show up today and I started my day by shovelling 15-20 cm of snow. I wasnt feeling too well to start with and the physical effort just wiped me out for the rest of the day. If theres any reason I'm leaving this country its the winter!! So yes Shovelling SNOW is another skill.

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Cooking would be number one on my list. Me and my roomies learnt the hard way though. There's this time when we invited this recently-married friend of ours over with his wife for dinner. We decided we'd cook something ourselves for them. After much pondering, the consensus was pav-bhaji.

Got the recipe off bawarchi and all of us got to work. When it was finally ready, we tasted it. "Hmm...Something's missing, dude!" was the general opinion. But nobody could put a finger on it.

Anyways, the friend and his wife come over and after some chatting dinner was served. We were all anxiously watching his wife's expressions as she took the first bite. It took her about 7 seconds before she smiled and asked "Did you guys put potato in this?"

GAWD!!! We all burst out laughing. So that's was we had forgotten. This was followed by so many other hilarious incidents, I can write a whole book titled "Cooking with roommates". I guess I will one day.

You guys have covered most of the other stuff, will write if I can think of something else.

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