In about a month, I’ll be in Copenhagen ready to begin my Master’s degree. While I wait, I’ve been reflecting on the last time I studied abroad, my student exchange to Canada during my Bachelors. It was both the best and most stressful part of my degree, my fear of being so far from home compounded by an alien education environment and clamorous neighbours. Here are some highlights, perhaps with a little knowledge sprinkled throughout the anecdote.
“My word, that’s a lot of trees”. I would have liked my first thoughts as the plane came to land at Victoria International to be more apposite, but thanks to my inability to sleep on planes I was fairly tired. A long boring bus ride later and I was at the university, I picked up my keys at the desk and made my way to my room on floor three. I shouldn’t have expected the dorms to come with bedding, but for whatever reason I had neglected to pack any. I stayed awake just long enough to set up my laptop and let my parents know I’d made it safely, before going to sleep resting my head on a bundled up hoodie.
Waking up the next morning I realised that I didn’t know where I was going to get my morning coffee. I’ve cut back since then, but in those days I was hopelessly addicted to caffeine. Google Maps informed me that there was a Starbucks within walkable distance of the university, so I made my way there. Sadly my degree was in politics and not Italian, and being sleep-addled and jet lagged I was not quite prepared for the array of different coffees on offer. Not knowing which one was black coffee without milk or sugar I chose at random. Turns out that Mocha is half hot chocolate and half coffee, and let me tell you it is not a pleasant way to start the first day of the first foreign trip you’ve ever taken on your own. The croissant was nice though.
The next day I rectified my mistake and ordered an Americano, which is technically not plain black coffee but watered down espresso but who cares. Having realised from the day before that I hadn’t figured out one was supposed to tip, they proceeded to make my coffee as slowly as they could. But coffee is coffee, even if it takes a quarter of an hour to make, and luckily that was the last day I had to sate my addiction there. The next day the university’s wide array of cafés opened for business.
I don’t know if this is common to all Canadian universities, but at this one there were no self-catered dorms. You paid to get your meals at the cafeteria whether you wanted to or not. While at the time I wasn’t fond of spending the extra money I did eventually came to appreciate a worry-free source of French Toast and coffee. Foreign students had to arrive a week or so before the domestic students, so without lectures or even many people, it was a fairly mellow start to my exchange. It was just a nice, relaxing wait before the International Orientation talk began the semester.hange. It was just a nice, relaxing wait before the International Orientation talk began the semester.
