Travel

I'm sooo note-productive. Whom do you know who has almost eighty notes to its active?

I got into a discussion last week with a friend telling me how strongly he had been affected by international affairs (September 11, war in Irak, Afghanistan) in the past, which drove him to travel around the world and campaning for candidates in France, in the US, going to China, etc. While experiencing stuff, he was learning.

This friend is now studying at McGill. During a class, a McGill IDS graduate student, invited as a guest speaker during a lecture, told of how she had been strongly shocked after learning how a travelling pack of white students in Africa was needing to switch villages after using all the available water. She was strucked by a child disapproving look of her cleaning the dishes with water, and came back to Canada to start changing her country before going to change others'. My friend learned from her story and is going to do the same, locally.

I noticed how I didn't need to travel around the world to know the same, most likely because of my weird analytical processing that is a non-logical network thinking (that's why I love environment, it's so holistic). In second year, when I learned that the "development" part of my Environment and Development degree wasn't about sustainable development, but about international development, I became really disappointed, because I already knew I was going to fix someone else's problems before ours were fixed.

Since I'm at McGill, my travelling mania was quenched a bit. I'm travelling within Montreal, in another language through international student fellows. Therefore, I'm not increasing my ecological footprint by tons while crossing half the world to meet to speak about climate change.

I'm an advocate for change. I need to change and improve myself constantly if I want to be able to bring people on my side by changing their lifestyles. I'm walking the talk. But new horizons still call me, the need to challenge myself into high adaptability through changing place at a fast pace.

After my studies, which I hope will last one year longer to spend the same amount of time at McGill as most of my friends, I will be reasonable and not jump on work already (I've never stopped from high school to cegep to university). I will travel around Canada, starting from Newfoundland, by train or bike (flying back from Victoria). I'd like to see the Great Banks, the Bay of Fundy, Athabaska's Northern Lights, the Prairies, the Rockies, the Pacific Ocean. And one day, I'll visit the Territories. But not just yet.