After 5 Weeks

I’ve decided to take a slightly new direction with this blog, wherein the focus is still my life list, but I’m more apt to just write about my day to day life and other interesting things. After taking a rather long hiatus from writing, I’ve realized I need to expand my focus in order to write both more and with more meaning.

That being said, I’ve just wrapped up a 5 week French program in Montreal, Quebec. I’m currently sitting in the airport waiting for my 8:30pm flight. It was a good trip but I can’t get over how absolutely burned out I am. I was burned out almost in the first week. I’m not cut out for the party life, and living in a University residence was party not stop. Going home is going to be a wonderful experience.

For the rest of the summer, it seems I’ll be going around Canada with some more abandon, hitting up Vancouver and Kingston. Looking into school programs and my future as well. Looking forward to blogging once again. ❤

Why is it so hard to get anything done, ever?

Yeah, I’m not going to Seattle. The infamous “Destination Unknown” trip has been cancelled, due to Adam moving back to Lethbridge and me just not having enough energy to get up to pee, let alone drive for that long. I wasn’t even excited to be going. What is wrong with me? I’m going to NYC in three weeks with Adam and I don’t think I’m excited for that either. I’m sick of these temporary flings with travel and awesome places.

I need to move. Somewhere awesome. I wonder how rent prices are in Narnia. That place seems happening.

For fun, here is a picture:

Everett Park in Kingston.

The Philosophy of “Just Do What You Want”

I don’t wax philosophical much on this blog, but in real life I’m the love child of Socrates and Plato (the gayest of all the philosophers: fact). And I’ve had a giant mental shift. The other night, laying in my super pink room, worried deeply about my future, Adam told me something that blew my tiny Stegosaurus brain.

And I quote: “Just do what you want”

Of course, I said: “ANYTHING I WANT?” (in caps, I talk in caps).

He said: “yes”.

Naturally, I replied: “okay, well I want to be reborn as a fabulous gay-sian man who can get away with platform boots in any situation”.

Apparently, though, “just do what you want” only can operate within the laws of physics, which honestly is a bigger rip off than the fact I can’t get Google maps implanted in my brain yet.

Anyways, this is something I’ve struggled with for years, the ability to just do what I want, unfiltered from my incessant worrying about what people (read: my mom) are going to think. Adam on the other hand is prone to punching old ladies in the face if they get in his way, because, yeah, he just does what he wants. All the time, doing what he wants.

In reality this conversation has shifted my internal processing, especially when it comes to my very undetermined future as a functioning member of society. I suppose most of the things I want to do (read: giant squid) break this lame “laws of physics” rule. No one has ever told me to just do what I want before. I’ve been told to go to school, to stop being lazy and get a job, and to stop wearing tiaras in public, but never to “just do what I want”. It’s an entirely new concept to me, really, and I wonder why there isn’t a class entitled “Just Do What You Want: The Philosophy of Punching Old Ladies Who Get in Your Way in the Face”.

What is this going to mean for my travels, my future job prospects, my social life? Probably all bad things after I’ve assaulted a flight attendant for looking at me funny, written my resume using macaroni and glue and then decided only to attend functions with the words “super awesome” in the title.

Thanks But No Thanks: The Calgary Stampede

Last summer I packed up my school bag and an over-sized purse, met my friend Chris at the airport and took off for a month. I roamed through Montreal, Toronto, Guelph, Oakville, Kingston and Manhattan. I took the Greyhound, VIA rail and the Metro. I crashed on couches, slept in cramped, stinking hostels, and rested in my mom’s childhood bedroom. I saw cockroaches, watched Central Park become aglow with fire flies, witnessed the tallest French transsexual this side of the Atlantic, and had a conversation en francais with a man about his pen.

That’s all nice. But the best part? I escaped Calgary for the entire duration of the Stampede.

The Calgary Stampede is a 10 day adventure that draws in tens of thousands of people a year, packing themselves onto our already stuffed C-trains and transit system to get down to the Stampede Grounds in order to drink, hurt small animals, and risk their lives riding 40 year old amusement park equipment run by homeless drug addicts (seriously). The best part is that the Stampede Grounds are technically within the downtown limits, which means trying to get to work and back from “the Core” becomes par with having the ability to shit out fluorescent pink llamas.

Most people who live in Calgary love the Stampede. Love it. 10 days of with a city full of foreigners just waiting to have a drinking contests and a one night stand. Or, you know, they own a downtown hotel and make several million in this one 10 day span. I am not one of these people. These 10 days mark the worst time of the year to live in this city.  It makes me feel so badly for people who live in truly hot tourist destinations, like Amsterdam. People who might never see their favourite bar without a loud, drunken buffoon again. Or, even worse, to live in a country where the only form of employment is to serve the rude, self important jerks who think their $900 vacation package bought them the country and all of its inhabitants.

I’m not sure if it’s simply that I was born without the cow-wrangling gene, refuse to define myself as “country western” in any manner of speaking, or that I was raised by liberals in the East, but I seriously have my hate on for the Calgary Stampede. Enough so that I intentionally travel to other tourist destinations to get away from the one I live in.

Biding My Time

I’m sitting here writing a paper that looks at the development of abortion rights in Latin America from a religious and colonial perspective. I don’t want to be writing this paper. I hate the fact I have to write this paper. I want to be in Latin America, not writing about it. Sitting on a beach, laying in a hammock, wandering the streets looking for something delicious to devour. Joining a group fighting for reproductive justice. Not writing about it so one guy can read it, grade it, and forget about it. After about every three sentences I write for my paper, I pop open Firefox and immerse myself in a travel blog, search a cheap fares website, or just look at pictures of exotic and beautiful places. I come back from day dreaming and hammer out the rest of a paragraph. I’m backpedaling, misfiring, completely lost in my own life.

If life is a highway, I’ve been stuck at a filthy truck stop for the last 5 years of my life.

Relevant Reading – The Unemployed Edition

My weekly roundup of interesting and relevant articles I’ve found on the wide and vast interwebs. This week it’s all about being unemployed!

The JET Programme
via Matador
Immediately after reading this article I messaged my boyfriend Adam and said “you can find work in Japan with your job skills, right?” This excited me. A year of living in Japan AND a job after I graduate in December? Yes please! Check for official info here


How to Make Travel Look Good on a Resume
via Traveler’s Notebook
Great suggestions for making all of your time spent wandering around work for you in your job search


Save the Economy
This entire site makes me pee myself laughing, and I figure since it has to do with this “tanking” economy of ours it is relevant to my sad state of joblessness. Installing toilets in all the rooms of my house? Yes!


Earn Money on the Road
via Brave New Traveler
This isn’t particularly relevant to my current state of financial affairs, but it could come in handy to other people! I’d rather be broke and living with my parents than broke on the road.


Save Money, Travel Later
via Vagabonish
A great and simple piece about four ways you can easily save money now so you can travel later.

When You Don’t Enjoy Your Vacation

I was trying to avoid writing about my trip to the Dominican Republic, but I cannot put it off any longer. It was silly, not wanting to write about. I’m just scared to admit the truth about my ridiculously expensive excursion: it was terrible. Not I-was-held-hostage-and-forced-to-eat-raw-cow-pancreas terrible, but I certainly did not get what I thought I paid for.

When I got back I was depressed. Not depressed because it was the end of my vacation, leaving the Dominican Republic made me happy. Getting on the plane was truly wonderful. I was depressed because the best part of my vacation, other than the odd playful dips in the ocean, was laying in the room watching the BBC and bootlegged movies on “Punta Cana TV”. I was angry at myself for letting my money go to waste on what I should have known would be a terribly packaged resort deal. Why didn’t I fly to Santo Domingo and take in some real culture and actually see some of the Dominican Republic? Why did I let myself be duped into an over priced resort with constant noise from helicopters and screaming Germans. Why didn’t I make sure there was ready access to fairly priced or free excursions and activities.
Truth be told, I could have gone to any over crowded noisy beach on any tropical island, I wouldn’t have known the difference. I have to take it as a learning experience though, no matter how embarassed and angry with myself I am. I know now that resorts are simply not for me. I like options, being able to go places, and most of all, being able to leave if necessary. The resort experience, for me, held the feeling of being held against my will. I had no idea where I was, no access to entertainment or the food of my choice. I was paying to be held captive for a week, or at least that is what it felt like to me. It just isn’t my travel style, which I can readily admit I am still learning.

Traveling isn’t something innate for me, I’m learning what I like and how I like to do it on the road. I can’t expect perfection at every turn, but I can expect myself to take crappy vacations and realize how to avoid the same pitfalls the next time I head out into the wide world.

In the end I came back with two things crossed off of my list
#241. Stay at an all inclusive resort
#583. Soak up the Caribbean sun

Regale Me

What do you get when you work 30 hours a week and go to school “full time”? Unhappiness!

I’ve been struggling to find time to live my life, rather than just going through the motions. Being in my fifth year of University, it doesn’t seem like the time to drop out of “regular” life to take on a life of vagabondry or backpacking. I find myself focusing more and more on the future (real or completely imaginary) to compensate for the complete lack of anything exciting in the present. I suppose this is the ascribed destiny for most of the Western world’s population; placid drudgery with a 2 week slice of sweet freedom once a year. I won’t even bring up the people working in free trade zones in the East. Doesn’t everyone dream of escaping it, especially during the idealistic phase we all go through in our 20s? Why is my life going to be any different than that of everyone else?

I wish I was more of the risk-taking type. My personality, my complacency, my unwillingness to attempt anything remotely scary will be my downfall. This list was a first step towards actualizing a thought I had. That I didn’t want to be 80 and have memories of working in a cubicle. I wanted to have awesome memories of drinking with rockstars, climbing mountains, and seeing everything this planet has to offer up. The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion I am wasting the best years of my life on the same kind of drudgery I want to avoid later in life. People I know are doing awesome things: volunteering in Peru for a semester, going to Ghana and South Africa for classes, three month long trips to Europe. I sit instead and plan out how to do this stuff later because in all honesty I am scared shitless of going off the beaten path, of going it alone, of being by myself in the vast spaces that fall outside of my comfort zone.

I need to get over that. It’s a requirement. Fear is not something you can take with you. So! My goal for the next semester is to find something travel related (working abroad, volunteering in a third world country, etc.) that scares me and just DO IT. Hopefully I can work something out for this summer or for Fall 09 semester that will jolt me out of my middle class suburban safety.

Have you ever done anything that made you uncomfortable or scared just to say you had done it?

The Next Big Thing

Adam and I are in the midst of planning a 10-day or shorter trip for the end of this month. You’d think two young people with 10 days off work and enough cash to get them somewhere decent would have a fairly easy time deciding on a locale, right? Well in our case, not at all.

Being we’re in Calgary our flying options are quite limited, as we have to get ourselves to Toronto and back if we want to go to Europe, which is $800CND or more, almost half of our budget. Canadian destinations are limited as well, since we were just on the west coast back in June and I was just in the major destinations Ontario and Quebec have to offer. Saskatchewan and Manitoba…let’s just not even go there.

We’ve been toying with the idea of a road trip to Las Vegas, which I wouldn’t mind since we’d be able to get to Bad Water in Death Valley and see Old Faithful on the way, both of which are on my list. It just seems like 20 hours of driving on either side for a few nights in Las Vegas. We could fly, but 10 days in Las Vegas would probably kill me, and we wouldn’t have access to a car besides.

Mexico or some Southern destination seemed like a worthy choice, laying on the beach, and taking in all the all-inclusive fun we could handle. The only problem with this is we want to go to Mexico in December when it’s cold and we both have some more time off, and why pay to go to Mexico twice within five months?

We are running short on time to decide. I’m at the point where I just want to say “let’s go to Edmonton!” and admit defeat. Who knew planning a 10 days trip could be this hard. At times like this I truly wished I was living in Europe and there were 10 countries on either side you could easily get to for a short get away. For the time being I’m going to try and not focus on the deadline for decisions wearing closer and closer. I might also suggest throwing Tofino into the mix as an option, though I was just on the West Coast. Sitting on the Pacific beaches and sleeping in cabins doesn’t seem quite so bad when it comes down to it, I think I could handle it.

Why Don’t ‘Come’ and ‘Home’ Rhyme?

I’ve been holding off from posting for the past little while. The feeling of coming home after a month of hostels, hotels, couches, and luxurious friend’s guest beds has been a rough learning curve. I suppose I sort of crashed mentally of sorts, drained of every mental resource I had being away, but I failed to prepare myself to come home to time sensitive obligations, working, and having to stick to other peoples’ schedules.

After a month away I wanted to come home desperately, I was almost clawing my eyes out on my flight home from Toronto as we sat waiting for 45 minutes to get into the air on the tarmac. I was literally counting the minutes and hours down until I could hug my boyfriend and pet my cat. I honestly thought that after a month I could just fall right back into the groove of my life, especially when I considered how much I missed it. The first few days I was home I felt the beginnings of it, the itching to get back out and live out of my back pack, to bed hop and do what I wanted whenever I felt like it. I missed surprises like French women screaming at cockroaches at 5 in the morning and seeing the most amazing transsexual women on Queen’s street during Pride Week in Toronto.
I’ve been back for almost two weeks, and I’m still quite literally living out of my bag. I’ve been spending as much time as possible at my boyfriend’s house, in some futile attempt to recreate the travel experience (though his sheet-less mattress does kind of scream “crappy hostel”). Eventually I’m going to have to come back to real life, especially when school starts.

Other than that I’ve been busy with work and other things like finding a new doctor and planning my next trip, which explains the large gap in posts. At some point I may finish describing my trip to New York (which I fell in love with) and my scary adventures home with Air Canada. Right now I’m basically lethargic and more excited about my potential Las Vegas/Los Angeles road trip than anything else. I’ll have to keep this crashing feeling in mind for the next long haul vacation, I guess.