Category: Strangers

5 Striking Realizations of An Exchange Student in Montreal 

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A semester or two ahead of you in Montreal, your plane banks to the left giving you an exhilarating view of Mont Royal and Mont Tremblant in the distance as you descend into Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. Over the next few months your life is going to change and what an adventure is it going to be!

It is Better to Feel Pain Than Nothing At All- The Opposite of Love’s Indifference

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i don’t write about my love life because it doesn’t exist
and friendships while enjoyable are hard to come by

sometimes I’m so comfortable by myself
i rarely think of anyone else

the freedom is golden, independence is liberating
interactions are confusing and riddled with exterior influences

I don’t know if the Lumineers are correct. Maybe it is a personal thing but all I could think of is how freeing feeling nothing would be compared to pain, or inconvenience more accurately in my world. How dark confusion is and how complicated the English language or even language at all can be. How you can say one thing and someone hears another. How the words that you want to say don’t string together.

I didn’t promise coherence.

University is wonderful but I lack the ability to give constant, sufficient attention to the places where it is most needed. For example I’m writing this post to clear my mind when I have a quiz in the morning and two assignments due in the week.

The most confusing part of my character is my interactions with others. My unwillingness to have anyone cross the moat from acquaintance  to friend versus my need for companionship and camaraderie. In most situations I am more wiling than most (in my opinion) to do things alone, I don’t need company to accomplish certain things, I won’t wait until I have a friend or family member around to do most things but I also want to lie down on a blanket under some trees and have someone next to me. We don’t need to be speaking continuously, we don’t have to touch but just be there.

I’m more than willing to interact with strangers, ultimately I thoroughly enjoy making small talk or deeply engaging talk with strangers but I’m rarely motivated to have those relationships grow beyond that point. In most relationships as time passes you converse more and get closer and so more personal experiences get shared. I’ve been known to decide very soon after meeting someone that I can tell them a lot of personal details about myself and what I’ve lived through. It isn’t difficult for me to disclose information to people that I don’t know well. There is this barricade that I keep up where we can speak through the spaces in the fence but you can’t come through. Most get stuck behind that fence, maybe more than should.

Some get past though and it seems to be much of the same. Once you’re on this side- a fact that is decided possibly by the second time that we’ve spoken, you can’t go back. You’re stuck in the castle and I won’t let you go. Years go by and I know that I should let you go but I don’t. We talk less and less but you’re still there in the spacious dungeon with no one to interact with. No one on the outside knows you here and no one here cares to introduce themselves to each other.

Some want to escape, others don’t realize that they’ve crossed the moat, a few of the inhabitants are proud of their occupancy and there is another group who knows that they’re inside of this castle but when I’ve ignored them for too long, they send me reminders that they still exist. Those cause me the most trouble.

You have no intentions of contributing towards the effective and efficient running of this castle. In fact you’ve been know to be a traitor. You gather as much information as possible, serve the castle well, protect the castle proudly, then you disappear and withhold your services from the castle when you’re wanted the most. You wait for me to seek you out but now I’m doing double time trying to pick up the duties that you left undone. I have no time for you. I can’t ask you why you’ve done what you’ve done. Instead while I mop these rarely trodden upon hallways and clean the glasses on the windows that are never opened I think about how you’ve left and how I wish I knew why. More importantly, I wish you told me the reason and that you told me the real reason as well.

I hate that you know me better than I know you but that was a risk that I took when we first met, when anyone and I first met.  We can’t talk now because you belong in the dungeon where you won’t see the light, where I won’t pass by as I clean these empty rooms. You belong in my past and by coming into the dining halls you’re attempting to make your way into my future yet you have no intentions of resuming your post. You’re only checking up and it is pissing me to hell off.

There’s no room for you here if you won’t do your duties. Yet even if in the dungeon, you’re still in here and I can’t completely ever let you go. Not now anyway, not anytime soon anyway.

You used to watch the sunrise with me but now you think you want to watch them from somewhere else but you aren’t brave enough to ask if you’re welcome there.

Sometimes I wish this didn’t ever happen because people don’t stumble back across alligator ridden moats to get out of these castles. Sometimes they hang around just to say that they’re there. I sedated the alligators and told you to go but you didn’t and now your mess is mine.

Part 1: Tips To Remember When Planning Your Vacation/Backpacking Adventure

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Heya!

After returning from a month of traveling through southern England and France, a trip that was the result of a year of planning, I’ve brought back some travel tips that I think are useful. Hopefully soon you’ll be well on your way to your adventure ready to have your own experiences and bring back your own tips for the lessons that you learned.

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Booking

F L I G H T S   &   H O S T E L S / H O T E L S
From the moment your mind wonders over to the thought of maybe traveling sometime in the future, my suggestion is that you immediately go look at the cost of flights.

More often than not, your flight will be the/one of the most most expensive parts of your trip. In that moment when you go online to check flight prices adjust the date in the search box before you search. The search is usually done at the following day or the nearest day that there will be a flight. This price that you see may be significantly higher or lower than if you adjust the date to the actual date that you intend to fly on as it is last minute.

In other circumstances, if a flight is almost booked, the airline may drop costs of seats so that they fly with a full plane. Once again this price is not an accurate representation of the cost that you will have to pay.

You can use search engines such as ‘Kayak’ which will monitor flights over a period of time and send you an email when the price of a particular flight is down. This is a really good resource that you should take advantage of once you have your funds for the flight ready.

Last minute deals! If you end up with a Monday or Friday or some odd days off and would like to go on a trip I suggest that you get flexible with your hours and destinations, search for cheap flights to ‘anywhere’, check out hostels/hotels/airbnb in that area and Voila! a vacation.
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Okies! Running to class now. Keep your eyes out for parts 2-6 and more pictures from my trip.
Laters!
Stay salty, keep adventuring!

Rushell