#toronto shenanigans™

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Toronto Log Day 2

July 8, 2019

previous day

Getting up at 6:45 am on my first official day of summer vacation surely felt like a stupid idea at first but the excitement I felt while checking the weather forecast made up for it in the matter of seconds. It was still cold in the room I shared with Alicja and 1 pm in Germany, so I texted my mother before breakfast while I still had the privilege of a WiFi connection.

Breakfast consisted of frosted flakes, orange juice and one of the best cookies I’ve probably ever eaten. Sure, the bagged milk took some time to get used to but ultimately was nothing to make a big deal about. I retrieved my lunchbox with the leftovers from dinner from the fridge and a bottle of water, put it all into my backpack and put on my Red Sox base cap before leaving the house, which probably wasn’t all that smart six days after they played against the Blue Jays in Toronto. 

My first bus trip was a bit complicated and only after asking did we figure out what to do with our token. The bus ride and the switch to the subway worked out surprisingly well for two lost teenagers, only when we got off at King Station did things get complicated. Suddenly we were standing in the middle of skyscrapers and noisy streets and my brain stopped working.

It took a while to figure out where to go and my poor knowledge of all street names besides Yonge Street didn’t really help to fix our problem. We did end up on the right street at some point and the instruction my exchange organization emailed to me beforehand told us to go to the front desk and say our names. We each received an introduction manual, an envelope containing the afternoon activities awaiting us in the upcoming weeks with our name on it, and a sticker that symbolized which kinds of test we already did online.

When it was my turn to do the spoken language test, after already doing the written one at home and scoring some 60 out of 68 points, I was kind of nervous but also not too worried - I managed to make the teacher laugh and all in all it went pretty well. After spending some time waiting for our tests to be evaluated, we went to the school’s campus, which was basically just some green courthouse square with a fountain of some sort in the middle of some more office buildings behind our school, and got an actual introduction, getting to know the teamers and some of the teachers before filling in a form about our travel insurance and our phone number. We then received a timetable with our classes on it and I was lucky enough to get into Level 6, which is the highest one skill-wise. 

After lunch, our teamers took us on an orientation walk around the area closest to our school, including the Gooderham building, St. Lawrence Market, Dundas Square, the Eaton Center, Nathan Phillips Square and the closest Shoppers Drugmart. It was exciting to walk down the streets and take it all in - the busy city that is home to millions of people. Compared to my town, that has a population kind of similar to the one of Monaco, and the tiny ass village with 30 people that I lived in, this felt like a dream come true for me. I watched a Corvette and a Ford GT doing a drag race from one redlight to the next and took the subway going into the wrong direction after struggling with the use of the PRESTO card for a while. I got a student’s discount on it, my passport be blessed. 

The evening was spent with another journey to downtown Toronto to visit the student’s residence near Spadina, a trip to 7-eleven that felt like entering a parallel universe and a walk through the warmth of a city summer evening, which induced my favorite kinds of emotions as always. I just knew that I never wanted to leave again and the weird feelings that came with that and the homesickness that overwhelmed me in the same moment were all just a bit too much.

Homesickness has always been one of my biggest issues during the first days of staying somewhere new - without friends or people I know and without the comfort of my usual environment but it is something that I am always trying to challenge and overcome. I hate homesickness and when I stared into the bathroom mirror that evening, tired but positively so after a long day of walking around and enjoying life, I knew that I was going to be fine and that I would miss this place more than I could ever miss home.

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Toronto Log Day 1

July 7, 2019

Looking at the date today and realizing that it’s really been a year since my summer holiday adventure feels so unreal but I really am motivated to start this little series here today. A few days ago I made a post asking about who would be interested in reading about the weird things I got up to while abroad and I was so happy when I received some answers - I’d probably write this anyway even without anyone paying attention to it, because this is mostly still a thing for myself to relive all the happy moments, but it’s nice knowing that someone cares.

This entire thing started back in 6th grade when I accidentally started getting addicted to sports of all kinds of forms. Ice hockey has always seemed cool to me and it felt fairly easy to get into it. I don’t know why or how it happened but from day one until today, I’ve always supported the same team in the NHL, despite all the pain it inevitably comes with. The Toronto Maple Leafs just had something about them, looking back I’m pretty sure that this “something” is Mitch Marner, that made me want to get into the sport more. Ever since then, my love for the city started growing and it is still always expanding day by day.

Toronto just drew me in, in a way no other city ever managed to, so when I turned 14, the idea of going on an exchange trip slowly started forming in my head. My English at the time was good for the average 8th grader and I had the best teacher ever that year, who further encouraged me to spend some time abroad - he even talked to my mother about it when she dropped me off for a field trip one day. 

I already knew that I wanted to go to either Canada or Australia, but obviously it’s not the smartest idea to send a young kid on a day-long plane trip on their own and Australia seemed like the smarter option to visit for an entire year instead of just a few weeks during summer break. When I stepped up to info points at a language exchange fair in my Maple Leafs jersey, it was pretty clear where this was going to go. 

The months leading up to the trip were a weird combination of excitement and anxiety, getting a passport, doing a language test, booking a flight. I still remember receiving the email of my eTA being approved barely six days before leaving the country. 

After a road trip from the most Eastern end of Germany all the way to Frankfurt Main, plus staying a night at my godmother’s place, right after the last day of school, the big day finally came. The airport in Frankfurt is the largest one in Germany and therefore quite overwhelming when one is confronted with it for the first time. To make things worse, the police had to close some part of the airport so I had to find a way around that area to get to the baggage drop-off. The lines divided into flights to the US and flights to the rest of the world, so my mom got in line with me and my brother. The worst thing was saying goodbye to them in front of the safety check and I swear I cried harder than ever before.

The fear of being on my own settled slightly after I survived the security check and got in line to get my passport checked but inevitably returned when I noticed that boarding would start soon and I had no idea which gate to go to. The guy behind the counter was really nice, telling me to have fun in school in Canada before I was allowed to leave. I arrived at my gate literally right when boarding started and somehow got to my designated seat without too much trouble. It was my first time ever leaving Europe, ever flying on my own and spending more than three hours on a plane, and I was weirdly hyped. I survived the eight hours on my way across the Atlantic Ocean with some actually tasty food, three cups of coke, half a liter of water and not a single toilet break.

Seeing the CN Tower during the landing approach made me a lot more emotional than I wanted to be. It’s still surreal to think that all of this actually happened and seeing the skyline live for the first time is something I’ll remember forever. It was warm when I got out of the plane at around 6 pm and tried hacking the airport WiFi to text my mom that I arrived safely (it was 12 am in Germany, sorry mom). Going through the procedure of declaring my goods was something new entirely and I guess I would’ve died there if my English wasn’t on a general level of acceptance. The guy filling out my form looked at me like I was trying to prank him when I told him that the only real good I was sneaking into the country was mustard (the present for my host family because my home town produces one of Germany’s most well-known mustards, it’s weird) and he struggled with trying to read my German papers about the travel details but ended up figuring out that I wasn’t lying about staying three weeks to waste my summer vacation in school on the other side of the world. 

I somehow found the woman in charge of coordinating our shuttles to our host families or the student’s residence, depending on where each of us chose to stay, and followed her outside into the mess that was the traffic right in front of YYZ. I met another German girl there and started talking to her for a while until we got scolded for not talking in English. The Italian students continued arguing about God knows what while I tried to calm myself down as I watched an Audi drive by - a bit of familiarity 6.5 thousand kilometers away from home. 

My legs were cramping and my sweatpants started feeling a bit sticky in the unexpected warmth of the evening and when I dragged my way too huge suitcase up the driveway of a house in Etobicoke, not too far away from the airport, it all started feeling a bit too real. My Brazilian host family welcomed me with open arms and to this day I’m glad that I got to stay with them, considering all the horror stories I got to hear the following weeks from other students.

I shared a room with Alicja, a Polish girl my age from Warsaw, who reminded me a lot of one of my classmates at first and turned out to be quite a lot more similar to me in some ways than I would’ve expected. We ate our first dinner together and tried to figure out how the hell to get to Adelaide Street East in the middle of downtown Toronto before I spent an hour trying to understand the TTC and almost getting a panic attack about how to use the PRESTO card, which occupies some space in my wallet to this day.

Luckily, our host mother sent us some directions for the following day and provided us both with a token each to get to school after we exchanged numbers and set up a group chat. We figured out that getting to school would take us an hour and a half at least, so we strategically set our alarms to 6:45 am to catch the right bus at 7:20. I was exhausted when I crawled into bed that night with my left leg still cramping once in a while but not jetlagged at all, which seems concerning in hindsight. I struggled with plugging my phone charger into the adapter plug before plugging that into the actual socket and shivered for quite a while before being able to fall asleep - our air-conditioning was broken for some reason and provided us with true Canadian winter vibes (it’s the only way for me to validate the “I survived Canadian cold” button on my backpack). 

It felt weird, falling asleep in a bed in a country so far away from home with no one I know around, in a comfortable bed with my favorite pillow that I take everywhere tucked under my head. I arrived, finally, after dreaming about it for so long, and despite not seeing literally anything but the suburbs and some streets so far, it oddly felt a lot like coming home.

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Someone from my language school posted a group picture from our Pimp My Flag for Canada Day and I’m on it, I completely forgot it existed help

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May I ask who's jimmy?

You may!

Jimmy was one of my classmates in my Integrated Skills class in Toronto. I was on the highest knowledge level (as in, the class with the best English skills) there and the students were usually between 15 and 20 years old. But not Jimmy! Jimmy was a ten-year-old Vietnamese student who just randomly disappeared sometimes, always wanted to play games instead of studying, and always nodded when my teacher asked him whether he understood everything, albeit with a really puzzled look on his face. He was funny and just a cute kid in general but pretty smart for his age and he could solve Rubik’s cubes in less than two minutes, I was super surprised when I witnessed that. He lost his pencil case or something at one point and I don’t know whether he ever got it back. Jimmy never failed to make us laugh, so his presence was always appreciated. 

I hope this answer helps haha

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I will forever flex with the fact that one of my teachers went to the same high school as Drake