This will be the last time I blog from here. Here being BCIT campus residence. I have some final thoughts about these last 11 months. I came here with different reasons and plans then I am leaving. I came here to become more employable to move away from my old looking at rocks profession to take on a more settled life. I also came here to get back out in the world and make new friends. Those things seem to have panned out. I feel that I have learned lots and I know I am more employable.
I say I am more employable because I have received interest in jobs that I would other wise not have been a candidate for. Technical skills and employability aside, I have found it is the secondary things that made this trip more worth the trouble.
The 9 months of this program pushed me harder then some elements of my academic program. The condensed nature of the program built a sense of community with some students that I had not had in 5 or 6 years since Hawaii. After the relationship ended and took with it any interest in my moving back to the interior I started to look at this town and started to like it. That is the first thing I gained that did not come as expected. That I want to live in Vancouver, the size and diversity attract me. There is an energy that many places lack. I have been to too many smaller cities where there is a strip of chain stores and every thing closes early.
The wanting to live here is the first major upset to my expectations. I have put my money and stuff where my mouth is. To prove that I am coming back the excess of my stuff is now in a small 5x5 storage locker near the burnaby vancouver boarder. I am coming back. And I am not coming back to a clean slate. Thanks to the GIS program having a healthy number of local folk in it I have start of a few friendships and a network.
This program, and the time in Vancouver in an odd way was a life changing experience. For the first time I have found a place where I wanted to live. Kelowna, I was happy to be out of Nakusp and have sun in the fall, but in the end I loved the Okanagan Valley and hated Kelowna. The north was the north, too far from any where and too cold for too long. Here there is a balance, warm weather good eats and as important good people to eat with. I discovered that here I don't just have to get by but can find all the ways to enjoy and enrich life without having to reach too far.
I will miss having a summer in this city but I will look forward to coming back into town and settling in to my own place.
2 comments:
Its kind of a bummer, as I was looking forward to random activities with you when my offspring was in Nakusp.
No one else i hang with likes to do ethnic grocery shop tourism with any degree of time and intensity!
You're in such a good space, and I am so proud of you!
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