Summary List Placement
Erin Ventura grew up in Los Angeles, and she describes herself as “a California girl” through-and-through. So, her life path over the past few years after she met her future husband, Justin Chiang, threw her family for a bit of a loop.
Probably the most surprising change? They gave up on sunny Los Angeles and Vancouver, British Columbia, where he grew up, and moved 3,000 miles to the northeast, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
After an election season in which searches for “move to Canada” spiked, Ventura talked with Business Insider about the culture shock from moving to a small city on Canada’s eastern seaboard, but also how the move meant they could make a lot more money, buy a house near the ocean, and achieve the “American Dream” in a different country.
Read more: An HR exec and her family are waiting out the pandemic in Barbados using the Welcome Stamp visa program and have ‘zero regrets’ — here’s how they pulled off the big move
Ventura, 29, and Chiang, 28, met at graduate school at Indiana University.
They both have fairly unusual jobs in the music industry: He plays the euphonium, which is a brass instrument that looks a bit like a small tuba; she’s a professional luthier, meaning someone who makes or fixes stringed instruments.
The pair met during 2014, and got married in 2018. But since Chiang was a Canadian citizen, and Ventura was American, they had to choose which country to live in.
At first, they tried a long-distance relationship. Chiang moved back to Burnaby, British Columbia, where he stayed with his family and worked at a job in arts administration.
Meanwhile, Ventura lived with her mom in the San Fernando Valley, and got a job in a high-end violin repair shop in Pasadena.
“We were kind of going back and forth between both countries,” Ventura told BI, “because his job was really flexible and mine was fairly flexible. So we were kind of living in two countries for two years, like crazy people.”
Looking for a long-term place to live was difficult, first because moving to one city or the other would mean that one of them would lose their job, and because the salaries they were making — Ventura said she was making “somewhere in the thirties” while Chiang was making less than $50,000 Canadian — wouldn’t go very far in Los Angeles or Vancouver.
“They’re just two really expensive cities,” Ventura explained. But then her husband auditioned for a job as a musician with the Canadian military, and they offered him a place in the Stadacona Band, which is in Nova Scotia.
“Those jobs are really hard to get, and they don’t open up very often,” she explained. “And we’re thinking like, you know what? Let’s try it. Now’s the time.”
Read more: A 32-year-old software engineer went through a ‘super stressful’ interview process at Amazon — but turned down the $167,006 offer. Here’s how she decided other things were more important than money, without burning any bridges.
As the spouse …read more
Source:: Business Insider
Supreme Court rejects Trump's bid to overturn election
Eminem sorry to Rihanna for backing Chris Brown