Its a figure of speech. Writing liberty. 8% is definitely a huge proportion of the city moving in a single day. For my own experience living in Montreal, no chaod but lots of furniture and other trash left behind.
It is, particularly since there is a) a premium price on the rental (3-5x last I checked) for that one day b) rental windows are shrunk (3-4 hours max is typical) and c) rentals are reserved back-to-back-to-back, such as 6-10,10-2,2-6,6-10,but often returned late, which trickles down. So last moves often end in the wee morning hours. Doubly fun when you're waiting on the previous tenant to get out before you can get your stuff in.
The same is true when using movers and moving companies, assuming you can find any with availability.
The best part of moving day is the free stuff! Everyone is having garage sales and sharing items for trade or for free on Troquer c’est gratos and other Facebook groups.
A similar spectacle happens near me. We've taken to calling it "hippy Christmas" I've dropped stuff off on the curb and it's been picked up in <1 hour by someone looking for new furniture.
In New Zealand that’s how you get rid of stuff. You put it on ‘the council strip’, which is a bit of grass between the house and the road, theoretically owned and maintained by the council.
Yup. The effect of 15% of the city’s population being students works it’s way to all corners of the real estate market here. I currently live in an apartment building that contains 0% students and is pretty squarely out of reach of most students price-wise - nonetheless, property owners here are conditioned to turn everything over on 9/1 at all costs.
I find the interaction with capitalism interesting. Basically(according to the article), because it makes getting future tenets easier, landlords will arrange leases to end in July, even if they need to make short leases to do so. This in turn means people are open to enter new contracts in July, which maintains the incentives.
If you are an individual buyer, you will have little influence on this incentive. Thats... interesting to me.
I will have to disagree with the article on this, really it is 2-way. When searching for a new apartment you will have way more choice in the weeks around July 1st than at any other time of the year.
In the weeks leading to July 1st you are pretty last-minute and won't have great choice. Lease renewals/non-renewals are due for the end of March (IIRC), so starting to look around April is a good idea.
In case someone is thinking about moving to Quebec next year ;)
This sheds some light on what I observed on my one visit to Montreal, which was that there were signs everywhere reading "a louer". I thought it was a bit unusual that so many apartments should be in need of tenants at once.
No, this is an economic problem in Montreal in general.
Montreal doesn't have the greatest of economies. Reasonable standard of living, good culture, but Montreal is like Buenos Aires a little ... there is a weird kind of dysfunction and chill that doesn't exist elsewhere in North America.
It's laid back easy living in summer, but brutal winter if you're not into it.
Quebecois are not mean, but they are insular if you're not Quebecois or actually French. 'They eat at their own table in the cafetaria' kind of thing.
The economy is iffy and weak, and there's very few good jobs, even the good one's pay absurdly low.
If you're any good, you can move to the US and double your salary, which is why it's a kind of economic trap - young, good talent leaves and it's nary impossible to convince people to come even if the net standard of living is good.
You almost need a reason: like super choice job, spouse, contract job, family etc. etc..
Another weird thing to me about Montreal compared to other cities I've lived in is that it's common for people to take their appliances with them when they move. Perhaps that's normal elsewhere, but it was unique to me among the cities I've lived in.
It's a Quebec thing. I moved to Quebec a few years ago and had to buy a whole set of appliances, as every other place I lived in always came with them. Looking at other places around me as well, none of them come with appliances.
Wondering the same thing. In the US it seems people leave ovens and stoves behind and sometimes washing machines but not always. In Germany people move all that stuff.
I think it's regional. When I lived in the midwest all of the appliances came with the apartment. Now I live in Los Angeles and you have to bring your own fridge.
> Either that or you have to build kitchens in such a way that it’s possible - e.g always free-standing fridges with no fitted cupboards on top etc.
That's pretty much the case in Quebec. My current place has cupboards over the fridge, but they are pretty high up, so you can fit any non-humongous fridge in there.
I'm really not much of a fan of the 1st of the July thing though. Finding movers is such a pain, and they charge 300% of the price of the off-season (every single other day of the year).
Interesting. I've never heard a sink referred to as an appliance. Anyway, I was referring to larger appliances such as stoves, fridges, dishwashers, etc. Certainly people bring smaller things like coffee makers as well, but that never seemed unusual to me.
In North America the refrigerator and clothes washer/dryer are usually the landlord's, but sometimes people own their own clothes stuff -- I think self-ownership is becoming less common with time, but only have anecdata to back it up.
If I ever rent out my place it will absolutely include the appliances (fridge, stove, dishwasher, washing machine) and probably some bits of furniture like bookcases, because it'd take a whole team of people working for half a day to get it all down 4 extremely tight flights of stairs, and that's half the depreciated value of it all right there anyway.
Washer/dryer is often included, because the law states that if there isn’t a suitable outdoor area, some sort of drying facility must be supplied. (In VIC it does, anyway.)
It's even worse in (some parts of?) Germany. Most apartments come without a kitchen. The law says that they have to provide a sink and a stove, and they provide the cheapest stove there is and a little pedestal sink. You're expected to ask the landlord to remove these and order a kitchen, with all of the cabinets, countertops, sink, refrigerator, washing machine, and stove. When you move, you either try to take it all apart and make it fit in your new apartment, or try to sell it to the next tenant. With first month's rent, 3 months security deposit, and a kitchen, moving in to an apartment is very expensive.
Are the cabinets, countertops, sinks, etc very different in German apartments? (Simpler, less customized, more minimal) You're practically describing a full kitchen remodel in the US, which might run $10,000-20,000, or so I hear, with at least a week of labor...
It depends on the kitchen size and your expectations. Your price range describes kitchens that we would never buy for a rental apartment, but only for a self-owned one or a house you bought. The more typical kitchens in rental apartments cost between 1000-6000€, and take one or two days to build up (for a professional, although a lot of people do large parts of the work themselves or have talented friends do it, so it takes a little longer but is cheaper).
Many times people also bring their old appliances from their old kitchens with them, so they only need to buy the cabinets and stuff.
It still is one of the big pain points in moving: what happens with the old kitchen, and where do I get a new one from?
Thanks for the reply. Still hard to imagine! The cabinets and counters in particular, the mind boggles. I completely agree, it sounds like a huge pain point.
But don’t you tend to stay there longer? Whereas here (Australia) it’s not uncommon to move every year – don’t anyone dare argue with me there, I speak from bitter experience – my understanding is that in Germany people tend to lease a place for 5, 10, more years?
If it's a rental, and doesn't include appliances, of course you'd take appliances you purchase since you own them.
In every place I've rented in Ontario, appliances were included -- which is common but not universal.
I've only owned two houses, where it's a matter of negotiation. The first place we purchased from a couple downsizing to an apartment, and the terms of sale just included everything. We ended up replacing the fridge and stove after a couple years anyway. Also learned a lesson there, because they included an old fridge in the basement that we didn't need but figured whatever, why not. We never even used it, and then refinished the basement and ended up having to pay to have it disposed.
The second place left nothing but the dishwasher, while the people buying our place offered some money for all our appliances. We took our new fridge and stove - since it wasn't really worth it to us to sell <2 year old stuff and then have to buy brand new at retail price - and sold them the rest for next to nothing (or maybe just left them, I can't remember).
I certainly don't think it's odd to take appliances that you own with you when you move to a new apartment without appliances. My point is that my experience everywhere else I've lived is that the landlord owns the appliances and renters just use whatever appliances come with the unit.
Yeah it's one of the most annoying thing in Quebec. Especially when you need to rent for just a few months, it's almost impossible.
It's not a "Montreal" thing though, it's a province wide thing. It's even more crazy this year with the temperature...
Moving your household in 115°f with 90% humidity is just rediculous. I've already heard some stories this year about movers just not showing up. There is also a very common scam where individuals pose as movers and ask for a deposit since it's near impossible to get movers in the month leading up to moving day, only to never show up the day of and subsequently disappear.
Well, I could think of one advantage not mentioned, which is that you can make sure to be out of town that day, and thus miss all of the havoc that is spread out throughout the year otherwise. Sort of like those towns where all the bars turn their drunks into the street at 2am, and you just know to not be driving then because the percentage of drunk drivers will be at its highest.
One of the most interesting blogs I've followed over the last couple years is Garbage Finds, a guy who picks historic/vintage stuff out of the trash in Montreal. Learned about Moving Day from him. He finds amazing stuff!
I'm not inclined to agree. Some holidays are just not as popular with québécois folk (Thanksgiving is another example). A long weekend in summer based around a holiday the majority of the people in the province don't particularly care about is perfect for moving.
That people would literally refer to the Nation's holiday/foundational day as 'moving day' - almost ubiquitously (i.e. on radio, TV etc.) - without reference to the actual holiday, is definitely antagonistic.
Imagine if you were in NYC, and reading CNN on July 3rd, and the only mention was: 'hey folks it's moving day tomorrow, here are some tips' - and that was literally the only mention of the July 4th holiday, i.e. no reference to Independence Day or anything else. And when someone piped up and mentioned - "Oh yeah, it's Independence Day" - and the crowd giggled ... (as happened on the radio yesterday with reference to Canada Day) ...
In Toronto, Canada activities are big, and way overrepresented by new immigrant Canadians, as multigenerational-Canadian folks generally do a more low-key thing at the cottage. Ottawa is different.
We (speaking for majority of Québécois) definitely don't care much about the ROC and I don't think we should be offended of that. It's just the reality of two cultures forced to coexist by a foreign power :/
Ans it's reciprocal I think. As a student en computer eng. I see it a lot. All my fellow students apply for jobs in Quebec and I personally have a hard time finding anything outside of Quebec.
Are you in Montreal or elsewhere in Quebec? I think Montreal is uniquely attached to both lineages and cultures. That is part of what I love about this city and part of why I chose to immigrate here.
(Oui, le français faisait fortement partie de ma choix. Or, à Montréal je peux utiliser et maîtriser le français en tant que langue primaire et commune sans abandonner l'anglais et les cultures dont il est lié.
// Translation for everyone else on HN:
Yes, French was a big part of my choice. However, in Montreal I can use and master French as the primary and common language without abandoning English and the cultures linked to it.)
Hello fellow anglophone in Montreal! I too assumed thought that was the reason, but turns out it's not: the party that created this conflict one year in the 1970s by adding two months to all leases which ended on April 30 is the Quebec Liberal Party, who are federalists.
Apparently back then Canada Day, which was then called Dominion Day, was simply less of a big deal than it is now.
It wouldn't necessarily, but in Quebec's history it did create that schedule conflict - before that there was already a mandatory Moving Day here on May 1 (i.e. ending leases then was required by law), first legislated all the way back in New France colonial times so that landlords didn't force people to move during our harsh winters.
The Liberals removed the requirement for specific lease dates in 1974, but they coupled that with a one-time extension to June 30, 1975 of leases that were scheduled to end on April 30 or May 1 of that year, as most were due to the former requirement.
Apparently the reasons for the shift were to let schoolchildren finish their school years first, to avoid a time of year with sometimes rough weather, and to let workers move on what was already a holiday (less major then than now) instead of needing to take a day off from work. And I guess they dropped the mandatory aspect since nobody in living memory would have wanted to create such a mandate.
If you simply mean that their legislation influenced rather than created the local attitude toward Canada Day, I agree there, although federalists like them wouldn't have acted with hostility toward the Canadian Confederation as a motivation. Quebec was already less gung-ho for that than, say, Ontario.
But the disproportionate tendency for Quebec to move on or around July 1 specifically was what the Liberals created with their chosen one-time shift.
Moving Day is an example of something I thought was normal but only realized was a local custom when I moved to another country.
Frozen thinly-sliced fondue meat (beef, pork, turkey) being available at any grocery store was another one. Fondue in a pot of beef broth is a popular dish for dinner parties in Québec since it scales no matter how many guests you have and each guest can eat however much or little they want. In the US the closest I can find is beef bulgogi from a Korean grocery store.
What are some examples of things you thought were "normal" until you moved elsewhere?
In Montreal, people line up in a neat straight long single file to board a bus, or for other kinds of queues. In many other parts of Canada/US, people either huddle around the entrance ready to push in or reluctantly make a disorganized line.
Switching to Brazil, I have a long list of things that people from the US or Canada would think of as normal, but don't exist in Brazil or are very rare (like garburators, limousines, and bathtubs -- not kidding about bathtubs!):
In the Netherlands you are often expected to remove/install floor when you move. Also, interestingly, no warm water in toilets in there either.
The weirdest discrepancy between US/Can and Europe is the amount of water in and the size of toilets.
It is, takes about a weekend with two people. But it is compensated by renter's protection, so almost every lease in the Netherlands is permanent, even if the owner sells the house. Typically, people stay in a rental for quite a while.
I feel you (from Quebec too, working abroad). The thing that shocked me the most in europe is the lack of facial tissues, cleaning stuff and many other things we generally have in the pharmacies.
In North America there's more space, and I think pharmacies are larger. The European pharmacies I've seen would have had to ditch 5% of their medications if they wanted to make space for a shelf of tissue boxes.
I'm speaking of Germany, but I think it is similar in other European countries. We consider a pharmacy to solely be a place to get medicine from, which is not allowed to be sold in other kinds of stores. They are usually located in smaller buildings where there is not much space to sell anything else (at least nothing big; most have some non-medicine but body-related products taking little space).
The "pharmacies" that are actually middle-sized grocery stores with a medicine counter used to baffle me a lot for the first times I was in the US. It felt really weird to go there not needing any medicine, just to buy drinks or food.
Yes we still have independent pharmacies that are medicine only, but a very large portion of them have been superceded by Walgreens and CVS which are 60% pharmacy/health and 40% a convenience store.
It is quite nice to pick up a can of soup and some orange juice while you're buying decongestants and whatever else. This model is better for the rural and spread-out US where everything is so far apart.
Indeed, if they had a pharmacy counter, where one could get prescription medicine, they would be pretty close to the American pharmacies. I never thought about that...
I think the reason why they don't is that pharmacies are pretty strictly regulated in Germany. They must be directly owned and supervised by a licensed pharmacist, and a single pharmacist may only own a small number of them (something like 3 or 4, a small number so he actually has a chance of supervising them personally). This prevents "chain pharmacies" from operating here, but it's probably also a huge hurdle when it comes to chain-style drugstores wanting to operate a pharmacy section - I guess the entire drugstore would either have to be owned by a pharmacist in that case, or the pharmacy would have to be operated as a separate entity (with a separate checkout process) inside of the same building, which is something that is pretty frequently seen in German shopping malls or those mall-like sections in front of big grocery superstores where smaller merchants can rent shop space.
But a pharmacy is for medication. Tissues aren't medication, can't be predescribed by a doctor and can't be ingested.
It's also not created by a health company, it's not required to be sterilised, ... In the end, you can even use toilet paper, if you have no tissues and it will make no difference.
So I live in Canada, but grew up in Australia. In Canada, you inherit the fridge and washer/dryer of the apartment when you move in. Back in Australia, fridges and washer/dryers are often things you need to bring along on your own. They're big items, I much prefer them coming with the property (if they don't suck, which in places I've lived, often they have!)
I visited a friend who had moved to Europe when I was in high school. I was astounded when I learned that German apartments came with no appliances, and if I recall correctly, things like counters were also brought with.
It makes sense if you are planning on living somewhere for a long time, but it blew my mind. In my experience people didn't even move their appliances when they sold their house and moved to a new one.
My place had a kitchen with fridge when I moved in. A lot of places on the market now have too.
New and renovated places often don't have a kitchen, but there are some that do. When you rent a place that had a former Tennant you often buy the installed kitchen from them.
That's the situation I experienced in Munich since 2009 - may be different in other places and may be changing from how it was before.
There is definitely a growing amount of places coming with a complete set of furniture - but that's just a trick to increase rent. It circumvents a law that regulates how much more expensive you can make a place for a new Tennant. Everybody hates those places.
Agreed... I got screwed in Amsterdam over that. In NL you can lease the furniture for 20% it’s value yearly - and the actual contract was worded such that the furniture should have been Vitsoe collection rather than IKEA. The worst was that the landlord couldn’t be bothered to fix isolation and the boiler thermostat because we’d be paying for the energy regardless; the final settlement was brutal (always take over the energy contracts, always.)
Yeah, everything in Germany seems to be set so that you don't move (and I'm not just talking about houses, but pretty much every other type of contract) for a long time.
Also for some reason they love integrated appliances. It seems their biggest fear is someone walking into their kitchen and finding a fridge there.
In German cities with tense housing markets you are usually required to buy off the kitchen furniture and appliances from the previous tenant, who usually overcharges insanely. Otherwise you would just not be forwarded to the landlord.
Also, these days a nice kitchen is an important status symbol for when you have guests over. So many Germans prefer to get new and personalized kitchen equipment when they move in. Knowing of course that later they will be able to sell it at little loss.
Are you from the midwest? This construction seems to be regional. Say this in much of the country and they'll wait expectantly for you to finish your sentence.
I'm an Aussie also living in Canada. Out of curiosity, where are you? I'm in Whitehorse. Every time I go back to Australia it feels dull in comparison to Western Canada.
Another Aussie in Toronto. I’ve found the driving here quite a contrast to back home. Drivers tend to veer all over the road, and don’t really indicate. Love the relatively small number of speed cameras though, Australia is getting a bit out of control with the whole multinova thing.
> Back in Australia, fridges and washer/dryers are often things you need to bring along on your own.
Note though that a lot of apartments come with dryers. Apartment buildings' bylaws often preventing hanging washing on balconies, so I suspect they're legally required to offer an alternative.
Well I only moved across the country (NH to CA), so the biggest differences I’ve noticed have been in dialect and food.
People think I’m quaint for using “wicked” as an adverb here, but the local “hella” is both less emphatic and used slightly differently. And my accent probably comes off as “old-fashioned”.
Part of it is just moving from a rural area to a suburban one, but at least among my friends & family back home, it was pretty normal to make a whole meal, or a substantial part of it, from home-grown, homemade, wild-caught, or foraged foods. I would’ve expected to see more of that here in CA considering its agricultural fertility, but I have to go out of my way to visit farmer’s markets or “localvore” restaurants. In New England it was just around—my family would grow/make/catch/find/harvest stuff and swap it with friends, neighbors, and coworkers. You knew someone who kept chickens, so you’d take some eggs off their hands so they wouldn’t go to waste; your garden produced far too many green beans, so you’d give them away—that sort of thing.
Yeah, SF bay area, although I didn’t actually hear “hella” that much until I started spending time in Reno, NV, where my partner is from. Most of my coworkers have been from elsewhere in the country & world.
>What are some examples of things you thought were "normal" until you moved elsewhere?
Where I come from, the UK, all the entrances to your house, your flat, and shops that don't have automatic/sliding doors would open _inwards_. You'd push a door to enter. Now I live in Finland an doors open outwards.
There are a ton of tiny differences I've noticed since moving from the UK to Finland, another example would be that light-switches turn on/off in the opposite direction to that I'd expect.
That said though I've started taking a lot of these things for granted now, so it is actually quite hard to think of more examples!
One thing I'll never take for granted is that the majority of flats here in Helsinki have their laundry-machines in the bathroom. In the UK the washing-machine would ALWAYS be in the kitchen, or in a dedicated laundry area if the house was large/modern enough.
(Also the UK would have all rooms of a house be carpetted, barring a reasonably modern trend of solid-wooden floors. In Finland houses are universally carpet-free, although people frequently use rugs.)
What an interesting contrast. I wonder if there's some regional difference in behaviour, or if it's just a case of mandating something which seems superficially beneficial.
To be clear, if it's an emergency door in a large building where a crush could occur, it will open outwards. But most residential buildings aren't big enough to require that, except for large tower blocks.
Which makes sense, until you get to fire-exit doors in the UK, which all open outwards in work buildings, which they have to by law if the building contains a certain number of people. Hence many small shops/offices will have exceptions.
Also from the UK, and lived in Finland for a year. This surprised me massively when I moved considering the possibility of the door being blocked by snow on the outside.
You also get the great drying cupboards above sinks (and correspondingly, kitchen sinks without a window directly above them)
I've lived in a couple of flats in Sweden that did it that way, mainly because the bathrooms are so small there is no space there for a washing machine.
Although by far the most common solution is to have no washing machine in the flat and a shared washing machine in the basement
Singapore - No hot water in kitchens. I thought I just had a weird apartment, but everyone swears, that outside of a few expat focussed house/apartments, 90+% of the country doesn't have hot water in the kitchen.
Renter's protection. Any lease in the Netherlands was permanent until the renter left. Most still are. Living 30 years in the same rental is not exceptional.
The small city I grew up around has a weeklong street festival that is a primary fundraiser for all charitable groups within 50 miles - every church and marching band and sports club political group has a food booth, Boy Scouts sell parking, etc. Move away and get confused at everyone having these small anemic standalone pancake breakfasts and ice cream socials, find out the Fall Festival is like the second biggest street fair in the US after Mardi Gras.
My wife grew up in St. Louis and assumed that basically all white people were Catholic and that you have to tell a joke to get candy when you are going door to door on Halloween.
Jaywalking isn't a thing here. You can just walk across any road that's not a motorway, as long as you don't get hit by anything.
Same with Simple trespass. Although that's the case in a lot of places.
This was also the tradition in Switzerland, but it has been relaxed significantly in recent years, most likely as the result of the addition of many out-of-country residents. Most Swiss nationals still assume that they can only move on moving day, but the ~25% of foreigners simply never accepted that and move freely whenever convenient.
It‘s more a result of the shortage of available rental flats so people can easily find a successor by themselves. Outgoing renters have negotiation power and the incoming ones have to adhere to whatever date they want, resulting in cascading effects.
New flats in big cities have arbitrary (ie monthly) moving dates in the contracts nowadays to bring them in line with reality. But it is never a problem to agree on any random date between you and the next guy, as long as you provide somone willing to take it over per that date.
I‘m Swiss and never moved on one of the official moving dates...
You can find apartments any time of the year, it's just that the majority are up for rent for July 1st. Moving at another time of year is a mixed bag. There's less selection, but so much less competition.
The UK has a weekend like this too (sometime last month) when all the university students in all the university cities move to other digs, or back home for Summer/Good. It results in horrendous traffic full of parents in large cars full of stuff packaged around the student stuck in one of the back seats.
The way around it if you live local is to remember that the parents will not know the local roads, and to avoid the direct routes that a route planner would suggest. If you are driving long distance, then you might be best travelling early in the morning.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadThe same is true when using movers and moving companies, assuming you can find any with availability.
This seems so insane. Do the advantages even come close to outweighing the headaches this scheme causes? What happens when July 1 is rainy?
If you are an individual buyer, you will have little influence on this incentive. Thats... interesting to me.
In case someone is thinking about moving to Quebec next year ;)
Montreal doesn't have the greatest of economies. Reasonable standard of living, good culture, but Montreal is like Buenos Aires a little ... there is a weird kind of dysfunction and chill that doesn't exist elsewhere in North America.
Source: I live here.
Quebecois are not mean, but they are insular if you're not Quebecois or actually French. 'They eat at their own table in the cafetaria' kind of thing.
The economy is iffy and weak, and there's very few good jobs, even the good one's pay absurdly low.
If you're any good, you can move to the US and double your salary, which is why it's a kind of economic trap - young, good talent leaves and it's nary impossible to convince people to come even if the net standard of living is good.
You almost need a reason: like super choice job, spouse, contract job, family etc. etc..
http://www.montrealinternational.com/en/blog/montreal-is-the...
Usually the places that are the 'most affordable' are so because the economy is not good.
Dishwasher? Washing machine? Coffee maker? Sink? Stove?
Source: I always lived in the province of Quebec so far.
But it’s equally crazy to remove fitted appliances that presumably have widths/depths/heights specific to the kitchen.
Either that or you have to build kitchens in such a way that it’s possible - e.g always free-standing fridges with no fitted cupboards on top etc.
That's pretty much the case in Quebec. My current place has cupboards over the fridge, but they are pretty high up, so you can fit any non-humongous fridge in there.
I'm really not much of a fan of the 1st of the July thing though. Finding movers is such a pain, and they charge 300% of the price of the off-season (every single other day of the year).
You move everything that isn’t part of the rental.
So you move your fridge, washing machine and dryer, and microwave.
The stove, oven and dishwasher are usually the landlord’s.
A sink, stove (with oven), and fridge all come with whatever you're renting.
Usually you buy a washing machine and dryer seperately, tho a small minority of apartments come with them.
In the U.S. you pay your first and last months rent, plus 1 month's rent worth of a security deposit...
Many times people also bring their old appliances from their old kitchens with them, so they only need to buy the cabinets and stuff.
It still is one of the big pain points in moving: what happens with the old kitchen, and where do I get a new one from?
Can confirm; you get pretty sick of moving every 6/12 months, but on the plus side, you do get a decent amount of variety. :)
In every place I've rented in Ontario, appliances were included -- which is common but not universal.
I've only owned two houses, where it's a matter of negotiation. The first place we purchased from a couple downsizing to an apartment, and the terms of sale just included everything. We ended up replacing the fridge and stove after a couple years anyway. Also learned a lesson there, because they included an old fridge in the basement that we didn't need but figured whatever, why not. We never even used it, and then refinished the basement and ended up having to pay to have it disposed.
The second place left nothing but the dishwasher, while the people buying our place offered some money for all our appliances. We took our new fridge and stove - since it wasn't really worth it to us to sell <2 year old stuff and then have to buy brand new at retail price - and sold them the rest for next to nothing (or maybe just left them, I can't remember).
https://www.ccq.org/en/M07_CongeVacances?profil=GrandPublic
Kinda ridiculous.
https://garbagefinds.com
https://www.instagram.com/garbagefinds
[0]: https://badgerherald.com/news/2014/08/15/photo-slideshow-hip...
The 'moving day' bit is a slightly subtle dig at the very notion of the country. It's complicated, though as of late less hostile.
Source: me, Anglophone living in entirely French district of Montreal.
Imagine if you were in NYC, and reading CNN on July 3rd, and the only mention was: 'hey folks it's moving day tomorrow, here are some tips' - and that was literally the only mention of the July 4th holiday, i.e. no reference to Independence Day or anything else. And when someone piped up and mentioned - "Oh yeah, it's Independence Day" - and the crowd giggled ... (as happened on the radio yesterday with reference to Canada Day) ...
In Toronto, Canada activities are big, and way overrepresented by new immigrant Canadians, as multigenerational-Canadian folks generally do a more low-key thing at the cottage. Ottawa is different.
(Oui, le français faisait fortement partie de ma choix. Or, à Montréal je peux utiliser et maîtriser le français en tant que langue primaire et commune sans abandonner l'anglais et les cultures dont il est lié.
// Translation for everyone else on HN:
Yes, French was a big part of my choice. However, in Montreal I can use and master French as the primary and common language without abandoning English and the cultures linked to it.)
Apparently back then Canada Day, which was then called Dominion Day, was simply less of a big deal than it is now.
'Canada Day' has never been a huge deal, which is just fine, but it's definitely 'something'.
The Liberals removed the requirement for specific lease dates in 1974, but they coupled that with a one-time extension to June 30, 1975 of leases that were scheduled to end on April 30 or May 1 of that year, as most were due to the former requirement.
Apparently the reasons for the shift were to let schoolchildren finish their school years first, to avoid a time of year with sometimes rough weather, and to let workers move on what was already a holiday (less major then than now) instead of needing to take a day off from work. And I guess they dropped the mandatory aspect since nobody in living memory would have wanted to create such a mandate.
If you simply mean that their legislation influenced rather than created the local attitude toward Canada Day, I agree there, although federalists like them wouldn't have acted with hostility toward the Canadian Confederation as a motivation. Quebec was already less gung-ho for that than, say, Ontario.
But the disproportionate tendency for Quebec to move on or around July 1 specifically was what the Liberals created with their chosen one-time shift.
Frozen thinly-sliced fondue meat (beef, pork, turkey) being available at any grocery store was another one. Fondue in a pot of beef broth is a popular dish for dinner parties in Québec since it scales no matter how many guests you have and each guest can eat however much or little they want. In the US the closest I can find is beef bulgogi from a Korean grocery store.
What are some examples of things you thought were "normal" until you moved elsewhere?
Switching to Brazil, I have a long list of things that people from the US or Canada would think of as normal, but don't exist in Brazil or are very rare (like garburators, limousines, and bathtubs -- not kidding about bathtubs!):
http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Common_in_the_USA_and...
Whereas American toilets have huge bowls full of water so whatever you excrete bobs around disconcertingly close to where you are sitting!
[1] https://www.expatica.com/nl/insider-views/Everything-you-nev...
Surprisingly, it remains clean once flushed - which I had serious doubts about when I first saw it!
In North America there's more space, and I think pharmacies are larger. The European pharmacies I've seen would have had to ditch 5% of their medications if they wanted to make space for a shelf of tissue boxes.
The "pharmacies" that are actually middle-sized grocery stores with a medicine counter used to baffle me a lot for the first times I was in the US. It felt really weird to go there not needing any medicine, just to buy drinks or food.
It is quite nice to pick up a can of soup and some orange juice while you're buying decongestants and whatever else. This model is better for the rural and spread-out US where everything is so far apart.
I think the reason why they don't is that pharmacies are pretty strictly regulated in Germany. They must be directly owned and supervised by a licensed pharmacist, and a single pharmacist may only own a small number of them (something like 3 or 4, a small number so he actually has a chance of supervising them personally). This prevents "chain pharmacies" from operating here, but it's probably also a huge hurdle when it comes to chain-style drugstores wanting to operate a pharmacy section - I guess the entire drugstore would either have to be owned by a pharmacist in that case, or the pharmacy would have to be operated as a separate entity (with a separate checkout process) inside of the same building, which is something that is pretty frequently seen in German shopping malls or those mall-like sections in front of big grocery superstores where smaller merchants can rent shop space.
But a pharmacy is for medication. Tissues aren't medication, can't be predescribed by a doctor and can't be ingested.
It's also not created by a health company, it's not required to be sterilised, ... In the end, you can even use toilet paper, if you have no tissues and it will make no difference.
- Bagged milk
- Ketchup chips
It makes sense if you are planning on living somewhere for a long time, but it blew my mind. In my experience people didn't even move their appliances when they sold their house and moved to a new one.
If the latter, sounds like good business for installers!
Is there a rationale or just habit?
My place had a kitchen with fridge when I moved in. A lot of places on the market now have too. New and renovated places often don't have a kitchen, but there are some that do. When you rent a place that had a former Tennant you often buy the installed kitchen from them.
That's the situation I experienced in Munich since 2009 - may be different in other places and may be changing from how it was before.
There is definitely a growing amount of places coming with a complete set of furniture - but that's just a trick to increase rent. It circumvents a law that regulates how much more expensive you can make a place for a new Tennant. Everybody hates those places.
Also for some reason they love integrated appliances. It seems their biggest fear is someone walking into their kitchen and finding a fridge there.
Also, these days a nice kitchen is an important status symbol for when you have guests over. So many Germans prefer to get new and personalized kitchen equipment when they move in. Knowing of course that later they will be able to sell it at little loss.
But even with a kitchen, apartments are very bare indeed, no built-in cabinets or wardrobes, no curtain roads, ...
Are you from the midwest? This construction seems to be regional. Say this in much of the country and they'll wait expectantly for you to finish your sentence.
I have never found anywhere more exciting than Whitehorse on the planet - IF you LOVE the outdoors. It's paradise.
Note though that a lot of apartments come with dryers. Apartment buildings' bylaws often preventing hanging washing on balconies, so I suspect they're legally required to offer an alternative.
People think I’m quaint for using “wicked” as an adverb here, but the local “hella” is both less emphatic and used slightly differently. And my accent probably comes off as “old-fashioned”.
Part of it is just moving from a rural area to a suburban one, but at least among my friends & family back home, it was pretty normal to make a whole meal, or a substantial part of it, from home-grown, homemade, wild-caught, or foraged foods. I would’ve expected to see more of that here in CA considering its agricultural fertility, but I have to go out of my way to visit farmer’s markets or “localvore” restaurants. In New England it was just around—my family would grow/make/catch/find/harvest stuff and swap it with friends, neighbors, and coworkers. You knew someone who kept chickens, so you’d take some eggs off their hands so they wouldn’t go to waste; your garden produced far too many green beans, so you’d give them away—that sort of thing.
So you're in Northern CA, I take it? In Southern California, “hella” is widely mocked. Regional differences are quite fractal :)
You can stick your hand in it and use it.
It's not known anywhere else and we actually laugh with it :p
Where I come from, the UK, all the entrances to your house, your flat, and shops that don't have automatic/sliding doors would open _inwards_. You'd push a door to enter. Now I live in Finland an doors open outwards.
There are a ton of tiny differences I've noticed since moving from the UK to Finland, another example would be that light-switches turn on/off in the opposite direction to that I'd expect.
That said though I've started taking a lot of these things for granted now, so it is actually quite hard to think of more examples!
One thing I'll never take for granted is that the majority of flats here in Helsinki have their laundry-machines in the bathroom. In the UK the washing-machine would ALWAYS be in the kitchen, or in a dedicated laundry area if the house was large/modern enough.
(Also the UK would have all rooms of a house be carpetted, barring a reasonably modern trend of solid-wooden floors. In Finland houses are universally carpet-free, although people frequently use rugs.)
You might still find old buildings where this is not true and they probably just predate the regulation.
But a whole myriad of rules: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fire-safety-appro...
You also get the great drying cupboards above sinks (and correspondingly, kitchen sinks without a window directly above them)
Although by far the most common solution is to have no washing machine in the flat and a shared washing machine in the basement
All movies are dubbed.
Only cops have weapons.
On the road, roundabouts have only one way.
You have an old money and a new money and you need to help old people with it.
Pubs and restautants should give you free water.
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/alerts/high-alert/quebe...
New flats in big cities have arbitrary (ie monthly) moving dates in the contracts nowadays to bring them in line with reality. But it is never a problem to agree on any random date between you and the next guy, as long as you provide somone willing to take it over per that date.
I‘m Swiss and never moved on one of the official moving dates...
After one year don't your contracts switch to monthly?
The way around it if you live local is to remember that the parents will not know the local roads, and to avoid the direct routes that a route planner would suggest. If you are driving long distance, then you might be best travelling early in the morning.