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Credit Cards
Yours truly had planned in advance and gotten a credit card back in his home country, but there seems to be no flux of information between different countries (except maybe the US). It simply does not matter whether you had a golden VISA in any other country, your credit history in Canada is non-existent.
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CIBC
Sounds silly? Right - even their employees do not know about this. I went to my branch of CIBC and told them I would like to deposit money with them to get a credit card. They had no idea what I was talking about and made me sign a standard credit card application. Oh surprise, I got rejected. So I took the letter to my branch again, and was informed that there was the possibility of depositing money into a GIC, and then be able to... You see, banks are the same everywhere. But do not be discouraged by these stories - you need a credit card, no matter what: If you want to rent a car or a movie, you need it. So get one, build up a history and then apply for a "real" one.
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Housing
When I came here, I had it all well-planned (or so I thought): I had rented a room in a shared house through the university housing service at a reasonable rate and according to the maps it was not too far from campus - no plans to move any time soon.
Well, the first thing I found out was that the landlord had mildly exaggerated the nearest intersection - it was about 1 km away from there and only 50m from another major intersection, of course in direction away from school.
Next thing was the fact that I could see no obvious heating facilities, but a hole in the wall. It turns out that heating systems here are functioning by blowing hot air through tubes and said holes in the walls directly into your room - and this can be quite noisy. Also, the first week winter started to set in, my room did not get really warm. I thought that maybe I am incapable of operating that hole in the wall (maybe there is more to it than just opening and closing it), but the heating system simply was broken without the landlord telling me - I found out a month later when talking to my housemates. Otherwise the landlord seemed nice - he invited his tenants over to his place for get-togethers and everything. Oh, and another thing: I was supposed to pay rent for the month before I arrived to keep the room (which I later found out was illegal in the first place), but I learned from my housemates that the landlord had in fact rented "my" room to another person during that month. Of course he refused to refund me at first, but we reached an agreement.
So come the following spring I decided I wanted to move: again into a shared house, but this time, the place was really close to campus, the rent was even lower, and the neighbourhood was really nice. But things got even worse: I really did not mind my housemates' occasional partying that much (although walls are in general really thin here), but the landlord minded keeping up the house or responding to my phone-calls: