After 5 years away, I return to the ocean.

At this moment, my life is full of excitement, and the good kind too! Last week I finished up exams and am now done my degree, and I have a grand adventure lined up for the summer — a working exchange in Québec.

The on-going adventures that are life…. This week is Reading Week, which means no school (yeah!) for a week, which makes for a great opportunity to skip town for a little Rest and Relaxation and to make an attempt to catch up to both life and school. Our ultimate destination was the Canadian Rockies, but we had an overnight stop in Lethbridge (in southern Alberta) to pick up a friend (who happens to live in an all-girl arrangement). At first I figured I could just call up another friend and crash on a couch, but that didn’t pan out — a combination of not knowing as many people as I thought I did in town and several of those who I did know having decided to skip town for the weekend (crazy idea, I know…). Plan B, then, was buck up and drop the hundred bucks and get a motel room. Plan B, however, had one major miscalculation — this was the night of February 14^th, and EVERYTHING in town was taken; we drove around for an hour and even the places we were told to avoid like the plague had pulled out their “No Vacancy” signs. In the end, we parked near where we needed to be in the morning, pulled out the long underwear and winter coats, and hunkered down in the van for the night, running it off and on to stay warm. So the moral of this adventure:

If it’s Valentine’s Day, get reservations!

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

— “Little Gidding”, by T.S. Eliot

The holiday season is drawing to a close, and for many of us, that means going back to familiar routines of school and work and life in general. I have always enjoyed the break the Christmas season brings, and the chance to catch up to friends and family, some of which I haven’t seen since the year previous. This year also brought the occasion to travel, and so I went to California for a week. I had an absolutely amazing time; I spent New Year’s Eve wandering through the redwoods and walking along the beach with a wonderful girl — it was the stuff memories are made of. But I discovered something more. As I visited the places, and conversed with the locals, I came to understand something of the differences between the two places — California and home. Things that I had rarely questioned were questioned, and I wondered the logic of some of the things they took for granted.