Mark Wainwright

First — happy holidays everyone! Second — I have no idea where to even begin with this blog post.

Well, I’m back at home in the UK after flying back from Canada and away from so many amazing things in my life on Tuesday. Of course it was great to be back in the motherland for a nice family Christmas and hopefully seeing of some friends soon, but at the same time I’ve been thinking a lot about the last four months. And, all sickly hyperbole aside, they were the four best months of my life, hands down. More so than at any other point in my life, I was consistently happy, did some incredible things and met some amazing people who I hope I can stay in contact with for much time to come. I won’t even go into how much I’ve changed through the time there, whether coming to terms with shortcomings or realising that some weren’t there in the first place. And now I’m at home, again sitting in my cluttered room; nothing has changed, and I occasionally avoid the sense that the last four months could have been a dream. Fortunately I’m wearing a hand-knitted toque that says they weren’t.

Without wanting to make this an even cheesier blog entry, I’ve learnt a lot during my time at UBC, including the following. Some of these are in-jokes, you might just be able to tell which…

1. I’ve met people from all over the world and I have loved how quickly coming from a place thousands of miles from someone else dissipates into complete irrelevance. It really does means nothing (besides facilitating easy conversation about accents, which is admittedly hilarious).
2. Helmets are good protection for walking.
3. Straight from the Uncomfortable Truths Well, my heart really isn’t in economics, or at least as it has been taught to me. However I am still able to find things within it that inspire me, so for the next year and a half of my life I am fine with sticking with it. I’ve come to realise that it’s just not in my nature to be able to focus on a single thing and be good at it; I need this strange ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ existence.
4. Someone, somewhere pronounces my name “Mork.”
5. Breakfast can be the best meal of the day. Nom.
6. I “have an accent.”
7. Luck is all…I’ve had such a great time because I fairly coincidentally met some fantastic people with whom I was able to have a fantastic four months. It all started when I bumped into Max, who I’d met once or twice in Nottingham, and who invited me to the pub. Without that, who knows what could have happened? Some others were inevitably not so lucky and found the whole thing so much harder. I didn’t reinvent myself, approach life differently or anything else to have been so fortunate: it’s just luck. (Mentioning this was designed to be of comfort to nobody.)
8. Skiing is amazing fun. It’s been less than a week since I went last (night skiing at Grouse Mountain on my last night in Vancouver) and I’m already desperate to take to the slopes again.
9. Halloween isn’t such a useless holiday after all.
10. Phrases like “taking the piss” and using “well” as in “well good” confuse the hell out of Canadians. As does, frankly, a British accent in general. And don’t even think about using the word “queue.”
11. However…Canadians are Americans but with common sense. It’s true.

I’ve been asked a few times, and I’m sure will be asked many more times to come, whether I’d recommend doing a study exchange, and you can probably imagine my answer. Although I struggled quite a lot with the academic side of being at UBC (in some cases, for reasons I still can’t understand), everything apart from academia made studying abroad the most incredible experience, which is why I will heartily recommend it to anyone. Nottingham just isn’t going to compare, but that’s not wholly its fault. If you’re wondering why, in that case, I didn’t stay longer, I tried (and tried, and tried, and tried) but certain parties at Nottingham just weren’t willing to help me make it happen, which only adds to my disillusionment…more on this later, no doubt. I’ve sent and received some of the most depressing emails in my life over the last couple of months. But now that I know that I’m here to stay, I’m under no illusions that getting into a routine in the next few months is going to be difficult, but for the moment it’s still really nice to be home.

To wrap up, it has just struck me that this will be my last post of the decade, if you choose to consider this the end of a decade, which for the purposes of this paragraph, I will. It’s been a great year in which I gradually made the volatile transition from freckly angst-machine to relatively coherent adult, realised who my actual friends were and then went and had the time of my bloody life in Canada, as this blog has explained at length. Meanwhile, Gary Glitter, Kanye West and Tiger Woods made twats of themselves, Michael Jackson ceased to do so, Obamania overtook the world (as did H1N1, mind you) and Twitter became the official replacement for actual communication.

Happy new year everybody!