On to the Indian Ocean
On the 4th of July, I graduated from Edinburgh University. The ceremony took place in McEwan Hall, a building which had been under construction during the entirety of my university career. The three classes before me hadn't been able to graduate in that famous building, and so my year were all happy that construction had just about finished in time for us. My family flew up from California and Montreal to celebrate with me, and we all stood in the characteristic Edinburgh rain taking pictures before heading inside for the ceremony. After graduating, the six of us drove down to Stirling and Dalmally, spending about a week exploring in Scotland, then flew to Corsica for another ten days on the beach and then to Provence and Paris. Following that, I went to Portugal with my friend Yui, then back to Montreal. Obviously, it was a great summer after college. Now, 2.5 months after graduating, I'm starting my next adventure on a new continent: Africa. And so far, it's amazing.
In the weeks leading up to my departure, I was nervous. Part of it was just that everything was so new - I didn't know what to expect, how to visualise the place I was going, the people I would be staying with, the things I would be doing. Imagining myself in Africa, I pictured the plane trip, and that's where the picture stopped because I couldn't fill in any more detail. I can see myself, for example, landing in Edinburgh, or in Europe, because the city and the continent are at least semi-familiar. But landing in Vilankulo, everything was unknown. Part of the nerves was also that I had a lot of time in Montreal to sit around and worry. I don't live there, so I have no friends and no job to distract me. My family is there, which of course is wonderful, but they, being Montreal residents, have their own friends, jobs and lives built up there. A third level to my perhaps irrational worry was just the turn my life was taking. Having been in school since I was four years old, the sudden confrontation of unstructured, unplanned, unschooled days seemed daunting. I kept telling myself I was being ridiculous - I could choose to do almost anything I wanted now, I was a university graduate with a wide open future. But it was precisely this wealth of options and choices which made it so daunting - no one was going to tell me where to go, or which classes to take, or how to schedule my time, for the first time. I was talking to my friend, who graduated a year before me, about all this and I think her words most accurately sum up the feeling (I hope you don't mind me quoting you, Chloe): "What it must be like to delve into something like that, something totally, utterly new. Terrifying, definitely. But maybe liberating too? Totally new: think about that. How often do you have opportunities like that?" And so, at 7pm on October 2nd I headed to the airport, boarded my flight, and set off into the unknown.
