Europe 2017 (Teaser)
Long story short, the culmination of my master’s, besides the thesis defense, was a 10 minute talk I gave at a 4 day conference in Munich this summer. My professor, admirably adventurous and opportunistic himself, encouraged me to take advantage of the lab-paid flight to travel before and after the conference (and, honestly, he fully supported traveling during the conference too). I ended up maximizing this opportunity by extending that 10 minute talk within a 4 day conference to a 70 day adventure that included: two layovers in Iceland (on the way there and back), the conference in Munich (of course), hiking in the Alps, traveling in Scandinavia, and realizing a dream of mine to go WWOOFing (in Norway-“the-happiest-place-on-earth”, no less)!
I am super grateful to my professor for suggesting and encouraging me to extend my trip. Otherwise, I would have flown home right after the conference for the following stupid reasons (and why those reasons were stupid):
- l love Toronto in the summer.
(Being effectively cold-blooded, summer would be the season I would enjoy Scandinavia most) - I won’t be in Canada for Canada’s 150th birthday.
(Canada Day might low-key actually be a celebration of colonialism) - It’ll be my first time traveling alone, on a plane alone, and I might be more adventurous if I went with others.
(I ended up loving solo travel)
(BONUS: my trip gave my loved ones an excuse to join me mid-way through the trip!)
Underlying the gratitude is a recognition of how rare this opportunity was. On a personal level, it’s only by the alignment of multiple circumstances that I can do this. For one, traveling for more than three weeks can only happen because because I don’t have commitments (work, health, family, etc.) that I have to stay at home for. Secondly, I personally can’t justify traveling for the sake of travelling, especially alone (too lazy to plan, unnecessarily pumping jet fuel into the atmosphere, etc.). I need a reason (read: excuse) to go; be it for friendship, family, work, or, in this case, “for science”. Ideally, I want to travel to live somewhere and do something rather than just visit? On a more “generally human” level, travel is for the privileged. My socioeconomic status makes it statistically more likely that I can be educated, have an opportunity to present my research, etc. (Although, on a more preachy note, traveling by plane makes up the majority of my carbon footprint this year. If the environmental impact of traveling by plane were factored into the cost, neither I nor my lab would be able to afford to true cost.) Furthermore, a Canadian passport is pretty good for letting me travel freely to many places. Even then, I probably owe the combination of being Chinese born Canadian for getting through security pretty easily.
Fast forward a couple months. Now that I’m back, I have so much to say but it been really hard to share. The first reason being that I’m not confident can deliver over two months of stories in interesting, modular ways that allow the person at the other end of the conversation to tell me they’ve had enough when they’ve had enough. The less self-depreciating reason is that the things I have to share are just so scattered. Obviously some things are events that happened (timescales on the order of minutes and hours); but others things are “longer-term”/general observations (timescales on the order of days and months). Some things were simply meditations I had while I was there, things affected me from the outside in; yet in some ways the trip also gave me space to realize things from the inside out.
Anyway, over the next little however-long-it-takes, I’m hoping to reminisce and practice gratitude for these various memories in modular blog posts. In this way, I hope to tease out the episodes that constituted this season of my life.