Vive mon francais!

The curious among you have asked how the immigration interview went. The answer to that is "peachy". I'd like to put this down to my knowledge of French and my impressive mammoth effort to speak French the whole way through the interview. But it could have been that the woman took pity on a 38 and a half week pregnant woman. 


Of course, I made sure to have looked up all the vocab related to "due date", "pregnancy", "labour", "birth", etc. I even made sure that hubby knew how to say "the baby is a boy". It seemed it did the trick. The nice immigration lady explained that she'd ask us a bunch of things and that each would give me a certain amount of points. If we accumulated more than 60 something points, we'd pass the interview, and she'd tell us at the end whether or not we did.


After passing a cursory glance at my PhD and MBA certificates (both of which I had to fold in half in order to keep them dry and protected from a most horrible snow storm, which I was very miffed about), she launched into a bunch of questions about my job, what I thought of Quebec, the baby and all such things. We had a funny moment when I mistook the work "lucky" for "singer", and I told her I was terrible at singing. But other than that, I pretty much followed everything she said and she followed my cobbled-together French.


The trouble is, I haven't really practiced in about a year or so. Speaking, at least. I can manage the listening part and have been training my ear to understand the Quebecois accent that our cleaner favours. But this lady's speech was very clear so it was easy to follow. But speaking, well speaking is always another matter. As hubby will no doubt tell you on his blog.


But in the end, my efforts paid off. We passed the interview. Not only that, but about half way through she informed me that my French wasn't "merely" intermediate, but in fact advanced-intermediate. I can't deny that I felt proud.


Now, all we have to do is pass the federal stage: it involves asking for police clearance records from only five different countries. Two of which don't seem to have functional websites or forms relevant to non-citizens wanting police clearance. All of whom seem to operate on different time schedules -- and since the police records are only valid for 3 months, this could be very problematic. It's going to be a juggling act of timing and remembering to request them at the right time. All when we're most likely bag-eyed from our new arrival ... due in a week, no less!