First day of work

It was my first day of work today, and it was pretty nice and easy. I rode my bike to the office in the morning. Riding a bicycle in Toronto is definitely much rougher than in Helsinki. There are no dedicated bike lanes here, really, though on few streets there is a couple hundred meters to a kilometer or two of what is called a bike lane here: a narrow lane painted on the side of the road. The only difference between that and a street with no bike lane is the painting, I think, as bicyclists would ride on the side of the street anyway, be there a painted lane or not. I haven't really noticed that drivers here would respect the painted bike lane anymore than they normally respect the side of the road they're on.

I had to finish work early, around two in the afternoon, to get to a government office at Yonge and St. Clair to get my Social Insurance Number (SIN). Similar to KELA/social security numbers in Finland, the SIN number here doesn't give authorities access to the same kind of centralized system as in Finland. Here, the SIN number is supposed to be kept quite "secret" and I'm going to give it only to my employer - not like in Finland where almost all government/otherwise "official" stuff works with the social security number. Since the government here has no centralized register of where people live, you can only prove your address by bringing some old bills with you and basically saying, hey, if these people have sent me bills to this address, then that's gotta be where I live. That still makes me giggle a bit, but it works.

On the way to the office, I conquered the mighty St. Clair hill on my bike for the first time, and was all sweaty by the time I parked it at the Arthur Meighen Building at 25 St. Clair East. It took me about an hour of waiting in the line inside, but the people who served me there were really nice and friendly, and gave me a temporary SIN card which I can take to work tomorrow.