Kerning Calgary

So i’m greeted on the plane over Manchester with a message from the captain that they are ‘keeping us in a holding pattern’ over the airport because of the weather. I was like, typical Manchester…great.

And that set the tone I guess. I had to recover from jetlag, go to an emotional funeral and miss my friends in Canada, all with Manchester’s miserable grey, overcast weather. Rubbish.

Manchester did offer me the chance to see my best friend though. Which always seems to make everything better. And I had a good couple of days being kept busy with various things that stop your mind wandering back to where it feels it should be.

But now i’m back in Falmouth, a place I know I love, but feels like it’s lost it’s sparkle a bit for me since I have left. Nothing has changed really. But friends have grown closer and I don’t feel part of their world any more. I know how weird this sounds too, but people’s jokes and the things that they are complaining about seem so small to me. I don’t know. 

It’s so early days it’s ridiculous over thinking it, but yesterday I was sat in front of a beautiful seaside view, just thinking that I was in the wrong country.

Early days.

So I never finished this off. I just stopped updating after I heard about my friend Stuart Tyrer, who will be missed. But on the other hand would tell me to quit whining if I moaned about him passing haha.

The final month or so in Calgary was incredible, there was slightly less adventure in terms of going out into the wilderness or travelling great distances. But it was an adventure because it was a time to make the most of being with the awesome friends I had made.

I worked hard, I had to, because I didn’t work very often. Deadlines loomed and work took a serious swing for a little bit towards April, but I was wrapping this around meals out, nights out and friends being around and about all the time to go and distract me. I was staying late at ACAD on the most random of evenings, because every other time I was with friends it felt like.

Maybe I am seeing the last month in a haze of awesomeness that might be exaggerated, I have no idea. The reality is probably that time flew and I had more work and less time with friends than I imagine. But what I do know is that it was one of the best months of my life.

There were several days in particular that I thought were ridiculous (in a good way). Not because of new sights or incomprehensible experiences, but because it was easy to tell how strong some of the friendships I had made were and I loved being in that moment with those people. 

One day in particular, after meeting up in the park, we decided not to meet the others at the pub. But stayed in, talked, laughed, danced salsa, cooked a meal together and ate around an episode of friends. It was perfect. 

As was the nature of the last few weeks, that was followed by a perfectly timed train ride to meet some friends going for a night out. I joined and had the best night out I could have imagined, dancing all night to the best music with the best of company.

And I am proud to say in the final weeks I got the girl. The girl I had liked since meeting her more than 3 months earlier, we had our time together around the sea of leaving parties and celebratory nights out. Those were good times, but made coming home that much harder.

I’ve put some photo’s up that I have been meaning to put up for a while. But I feel disrespectful blogging this week.

Got some terrible news a couple of days ago which is pretty hard to process.

Rest in peace, I am glad you were doing something you loved.

:(

Ok so I am going to write about this now, I have some time before I hit they hay. 

What a ridiculously awesome evening, one of the best there has been. Set off with friends from across the corridor of my residence to get picked up and taken to a house in the suburbs for an Easter meal. 

What an awesome house, it’s full of crazy things from adventures and places the owners have lived and collections they have gathered. And of course art that has been made. From a collection of old butter churning devices to a handmade indonesian gong and old toilets being made into an art project. So cool.

Good old fashioned games, including spoons (YES) followed by nice chat with serious amounts of food in a proper easter style dinner. Lots of people round, getting together over a nice meal, this is what I want if I ever decide to settle down.

The meal was followed by a fun little easter egg hunt, where I got the shock of my life and screamed like a little girl when an angry (but embarrassingly tiny) dog barked at me out of nowhere in the closet. 

What next? Off outside to gather around a log fire, play with fire poi and sing songs while people play guitars. Sounds cheesy, but my god it was so happy to be there.

Then events got serious…

Shouts of fire broke out and we rushed to put our campfire out with snow and head round to the other side of the house. A fire had erupted in the yard of a house across the street, with the flames reaching as high as the house itself. There was a bit of panic after hearing the hiss of a gas leak, so we retreated to the back of the house in the worry that something could blow. Fortunately the fire brigade were on the ball and 3/4 fire trucks were there within a few minutes to sort the flames out, so it quickly became a spectator sport for the next hour or so. Crazy times indeed.

The house had been empty with the family that lived there having seemingly left earlier that day for a weekend away, so after most of the action had died down we heading back inside to finish off our evening with some dessert and a lot to talk about.

It was just so nice, and made me so happy. I was also shown the cabin that Louanne owns in the yukon. Absolutely stunning. She also showed us what they plan to be building in the next years. I don’t want to go home, I want to go up to the yukon and help them build. And I will, I have told them this.

This week has been a pretty good one i’d say. Barely did any work, which I am going to regret next week and did a lot of social things which has been awesome. Last night FINALLY went out with a couple of friends that I have not had chance to go out with before and we ended up at a swanky house owned by none other than the friendly chap that me and Emma had met the first week of being here. He’s such an awesome guy!

His flatmate was also pretty cool to get on with and I had a weird moment where he was showing me pictures from when he visited an old falmouth exchange student that he made friends with. I was looking at photo’s on his phone of falmouth, from last year where I would have been wandering the streets. It’s so crazy thinking how small the world can feel, with people from 8,000 miles away having the same connections.

The only bad part of this week is that i’ve started to get post-holiday blues already. How can that be i’m still here? I guess i’m really going to miss it. There is only 21 days before I head home which feels like nothing and I wish I had more time to spend with the people i’ve met here.

I’m slightly obsessed with making the most of every single weekend at the moment, which is stupid when I start beating myself up for just having a chilled out day or for when plans don’t work out. 

This weekend should be great though, big easter meal out of town somewhere which I am so excited about. I’m looking forward to some good old fashioned convers and great food, although I am slowly learning to not have expectations so whatever happens will be really great.

Also booked a Nisan sentry that will hopefully take me (finally) to kicking horse to have a play in the snow. Although I would have liked my friend nick to come, it should be an awesome day and i’m not sure how long it will be open for so best fit it in whilst I have te chance. I just hope there are no random hiccups with the rental process!

Peace-out.

So let me tell you about this weekend, not over yet, but I can’t imagine anything in particular will happen tonight (THANK GOD). The thing about this blog is that I wanted it to be a pretty honest account of what the exchange has been like so let me tell you about this weekend, I have just got back and have absolutely no idea whether I can say it was a good weekend or not.

The hectic part of the weekend started on thursday. I wanted to go out that night because I hadn’t been out with the guys on a thursday, and I knew I had to be up at 4am saturday morning so wasn’t going to be up too late Friday. There is also the small matter of wanting to dance with one girl in particular… So even though I have class the next morning, I figure I will go and make the most of it because hey i’m in Calgary.

So all I knew of this place was it was nicknamed ‘Thursden’. It turned out to be the University of Calgary student club so we set off towards the place in good spirits. The place was pretty standard of university clubs and with the music being kinda normal I didn’t end up doing too much dancing. I actually had one of those nights where you spend most of the time looking for people you know, wandering around squinting at strangers trying to work out if you know them in the low light, you have all been there. I had managed to get myself accidentally a little too dutch-courage’d but was still easily in a state where I felt awkward being around drunk people making decisions they will regret. People say I need to loosen up. I do try, but some things just aren’t me, and that was a little bit of a theme for saturday.

Friday wasn’t to hectic, was quite social and had a needed talk with a friend that is quite important to me here. This did unfortunately mean that I ended up missing Mug night, the Glass department fund raiser which I had been helping them out with for the past few weeks and was looking forward to hanging out with them. It would have also been an opportunity to meet one of the guys I would be boarding with the next day. But I can’t fit everything in, and at least it gave me a chance to try (and fail) at getting some rest for the next day.

So 4.10am my alarm goes off. Didn’t sleep too well so I obviously didn’t wake from a deep sleep and felt ok. Got my stuff together and went to go and wait to be picked up at 5.15am from the car park of Starbucks by a man I had never met to go and ride Fernie, a resort 3 hours drive away (hence the early start).

I should say at this point that my connection for going was that of the husband and friends of a very nice lady that works at uni. So I get picked up, usual small talk, friends arrive and we get going for the drive down.

The morning boarding was hard, seriously tough conditions, it looks like Fernie is reaching the end of it’s season, the fresh powder we were expecting hadn’t stayed cold so it was the crustiest slope I had ever ridden. I was ok with this as I take it as a challenge but it was certainly the wettest I have ever been while riding. I ended up losing the guys I was with, and with no form of communication I just decided to go off for a bit and ride hoping that I may bump into them. 

I had an awesome time, The top of the slope was still cold enough to be powder and although a little choppy, I found some really good snow on a few faces that not so many people would hit, loved it. Made it down through the slush to base around lunch and ended up finding the guys having lunch in the restaurant. The rain came down pretty hard while we were eating so the guys decided they needed a certain amount of beer before they went out again (but at least they decided to stay and do some more runs).

The afternoon riding was sweet, we were soaking but I was still enjoying it. I don’t think the others liked so much being on cold chairlifts with wet clothes on so we headed back down to go and enjoy the 80’s hottub time machine party that was happening (apparently it was filmed there).

I ended up being elected (partly my choice) as being designated driver to get them to dinner where we were staying that night. So I tried to stay on the water as I watched these guys downing the beers.

So a day of firsts, first time in BC, first time riding fernie, first time driving a suberu impreza, first time driving on the wrong side of the road, on canadian roads in a manual car with the gears on the wrong side. I am pretty proud of myself for getting this drunk rabble of people I barely knew back to the town of fernie from the resort.

This of course wasn’t without the drunken decision to stop off at the Canadian legion, which was interesting…

Finally get to where we were staying and meet Eric, a really nice guy who was at first pretty shocked at the mess he had invited to stay but by the time we got settled and had food going the rabble had calmed down a bit and become coherent. 

Things started looking up, the condo that this guy owned was insane, ridiculously nice and of luxury. We had raclette, a really sociable meal based around a hot stone that cooks your meet and vegetables, and a lower shelf for melting cheese. Lots of food, a bit of wine and some good guy talk made me feel a whole lot better about where I was than a few hours before.

FInally having finished eating we then headed out to go and embarrass our host in the small town. My favourite place being a very nice, and sophisticated wine bar. With live music and a great atmosphere being made slightly less sophisticated by one of our number deciding to do interpretive dance right in front of the band for most of the night and convincing the waitress to dance with him. He even headed back later in the evening to ask for the last dance, which he got and I couldn’t help but be impressed.

The night ended pleasantly and after a bad nights sleep and an early morning followed by snowboarding I was definitely ready for bed.

It was an interesting couple of days, and i’m don’t think I would like to do anything like that again but it is something I can call a life experience. I just wish I could find more people in life that cared more about doing things than getting drunk.

Ok I haven’t updated this thing for a while, sorry about that.

During the week has mostly been pretty standard, getting work done and having deadlines and crits/presentations. St Patricks day was an interesting one, I had planned on riding a resort that’s 3 hours + away to drive so needs a little more planning but this never happened as soon as everybody realised how hungover they will be after St Patricks, tried to make the most of it with a night out with the guys here, which turned out to be pretty fun (i.e music I can dance to).

ACAD have a thing called show and sale that they did through the week, basically loads of art is put up by students and anybody can come and buy it. It’s really good way for the artists to get their work out there and make some money while they are at it. Now back in Falmouth this kind of thing would never work, at least not to the same scale, mainly because of the general lack of respect for students from the locals. 

Here in Calgary there is a really good mentality towards art, there is constantly new art shows and gallery openings and there is a huge community of artists. The students here seem to be respected for what they do and it shows in the sales of art at the show and sale. 

The big oil companies send people to find abstract art for their buildings and are prepared to pay big for it too. People come to find art for newly decorated rooms and some keep track of promising artists for the future. The whole thing works incredibly well,  I just wish I had thought ahead enough to do a big abstract piece with an astronomical price tag, just to see what happens.

The main highlight of my week though was an avalanche safety training course. A pretty intense weekend with 1 day of class learning what causes avalanches, how to spot avalanche terrain and working out safe ways to cross potentially dangerous routes, lots of things like that.

Second day was out in the field, playing with transceivers, digging holes, looking at snow pack, snowshoeing, more digging, locating buried transceivers, digging, and a little ride down a slope that was only open for cat skiing, so had pretty untouched powder galore.

It was a tough day, I didn’t have a backpack to carry my snowboard, so had to just carry it in my hand all the way up, that along with desperately digging through 2m of snow to practise trying to save somebody from suffocation. Tough but totally worth doing.

One of the cool things was that this certain mountain, fortress mountain is an old ski hill that was used in the film Inception! I was a little bit gutted to find out they destroyed the building they used when they blew it up in the film, but it’s still pretty ace. I haven’t got too many photo’s as I was there to learn and didn’t have that many opportunities when we stopped but I took a few one my phone.

Another awesome day spent in the hot shop today. I keep deciding to stay after our class finishes at 5pm so I can hang out and help out with the glass majors making mugs for their fundraising event in a few weeks. 

Pretty gutted that it came up that we only had like 5 lessons left…5 lessons of hot glass before I go back to a uni where I can’t do it. This makes me sad but at least I can say i’m making the most of the opportunity staying around to learn from the more experienced guys.

I was in a bit of a weird situation where my tutor put in a good word about me when the head of the program was about. Who then told me I should transfer here on to the glass program. Something which before now I had just been told was hard to get into and I guess I hadn’t thought about. But I just have so much fun doing it that maybe it’s something worth considering?

Now I do love Graphic Design (this is what I keep telling myself). And if I found the right place to work, (a place where I could go wild and not be bogged down having to be ‘safe’ in the work, mainly because there is a lot of money involved) I would love it, I could try for cool ideas and do new things every project. But my god playing with lava is fun, and learning a new, practical skill is fun.

I am looking forward to getting back to falmouth with a fresh head and more time than here to work on some crazy ideas. I am also very happy living in falmouth, a beautiful seaside town where I can jog round the coast, surf and generally have an awesome time with nice people. But wouldn’t it be amazing to scrap all that, move to canada and become a glass blowing student, it gives me that nervous excitement, and the smell of adventure.

For now I am just tempted, seeing the merit in completing the course back home, getting a degree in my pocket and enjoying my time by the sea. I also look forward to not being a student, I love to learn but have always felt that life started after university. But who knows what changes in thinking the next 2 months will bring…