Very shortly I'll be getting on a plane to from Adelaide to Vancouver for a 4 month or so University exchange. I'll be honest, I'm a little apprehensive.
This trip is on a bit of a different league to leaving the house for a week for a trip down to the beach with some friends. I know approximately zero people in Vancouver and I'm a long way from my family if I get into trouble. But none of this is really very interesting to talk about because as scared as I am there are about 1000 other people heading to UBC (University of British Columbia) for exactly the same exchange experience.
I could moan and whine about how I'm worried about making friends, or that I don't know the first thing about tipping, that I don't know how I'll deal with being away from my parents for so long and how only one of my six roommates has bothered to return my emails plus others. I'm not going to though, because there must be hundreds of similar thoughts expressed on blogs like this from around the world and it doesn't really need to be elaborated on any more.
What I can do is look at this positively, and moan and whine about 4 things that I'm not going to have to deal with in Vancouver.
1.
Australian media
Suffice to say that media coverage of anything important is non existent. Now the cynics among anyone who reads this may think something along the lines of "but nothing important happens in Australia". Which is essentially correct, but the least they could do is cover world news with some consistency. Key stories include an ex prime minister sculling a beer at a cricket match. I try not to subject myself to actually watching any of it but every now and then A Current Affair manages to slip something through my defenses.
2.
Heat
I'm sure the rest of the world understands that Australia is hot, but I really am looking forward to missing out on more than half of Adelaide's summer. I prefer cold weather in general (cold for Australia anyway) so how am I supposed to deal with 45+ degrees Celsius days. One week down at the beach it was so hot we couldn't actually go outside and just sat around with minimal clothes on. Other highlights include it being 50 whilst driving in the country and the asphalt melting. Freezing cold will be a nice change once I get to BC.
3.
AFL
Australian Rules Football is the national sport, yet I have never and probably never will have any interest in it. This is all well and good you might think, but AFL is borderline ingrained in the fabric of Australian society. Meeting a stranger is usually followed with determining which team each individual supports. Trying to explain that I have no understanding of this sport is met with blank stares or awkward laughter. At least I'll have the excuse that I'm foreign when it comes to Ice Hockey in Canada.
4.
Magpies
At this point I'll warn you that a lot of this blog will end up being about bicycles, specifically mountain bikes, which I can't seem to stop riding/reading about/talking about/buying and may have greatly informed my decision of choosing UBC as my exchange destination. Unfortunately in Australia we have medium sized birds that have evolved to 'swoop' other animals in nesting season, presumably to scare off predators. Somewhere along the line the birds decided it would be a good idea to swoop humans and cyclists. At best a several hundred gram bird hitting your helmet with its feet is a minor annoyance, but there is just some part of me that cannot help but flinch when I'm just riding along concentrating on the trail ahead and the damn whoosh of air comes up beside me. Its currently nesting season and they piss me off so much I've had to stop riding at my local trail centre. I will most definitely not miss them.
