Awesomeness summary

Where should I start…? The time passed by so fast in the 2nd term and everything was more important and more acute than writing a blog. Now I am back home and have some time to recap. Read on, if you don’t wanna hear a summary of what happened, but an awesome story full of adventures, achievements and action around February until now. I also want to drop some lines for all those wonderful friends that gave me accompany the last year and should earn a prize or be listed on a big statue of friendship in the main square of one of those big cities rather than being just mentioned here, but that’s, at first, all I can do.

Whaam – my mind warps back in time to February, where this whole blog started to be the least important thing to be in my life. Everything happened fast, you just realized that the 2nd term already started, new subjects and all. The most important thing but wasn’t school, of course, instead I literally got thrown on the train to Arizona with 30 other awesome people to hike the Grand Canyon. Preparation time was short as usual, so your mind got blown away in the train at last, because you are going to have one of the most awesome reading-week holidays in your life: The Grand Canyon! Three days on the train to Arizona, five days in the Canyon and one final day in Las Vegas, what a sweet outline. You just can’t explain the group experience and all of the trip, it’s simply too big. We got a big fat family with aunts and uncles and all, split in 4 close ones with 8 members. I was with Meridith’s group, our leader, mum and outrider, never letting us know how heavy her backpack was and always having a dirty smile on her face, mostly because all the jokes down in the canyon get dirtier the deeper it gets. She is the toughest girl I know, simply impressive. ["you gotta know when to hold 'em"] – this song got burned in my mind on the hike.
I got my camera with me on this trip and finally cut out a video of nearly 2 hours of footage. Watch closely, there is about one million cuts in this clips, you could watch it in slow-motion and still be excited like hell, at least, I could.

It is like hiking a mountain in reverse: Going down with a full backpack, all your food and water filled up to the top of your bag, but you’ll have a light backpack on the hike up from the bottom. If you reach your goal, you are at the deepest spot of the hike and when you look around you’ll see the mountains around you, then you’ll return back up!

We smelled like 5 days canyon after that, but I liked it, had a stopover in Flagstaff, where I bought a CD of The Soft Hands in a bar from the bass-player for a shot and continued to party the last day of our trip in Las Vegas. We crashed a limo ride, had fun in every goddam casino on the strip and after only 20 hours we flew out of town, got smacked by normal life as we arrived in Hamilton.

A week of party followed, some Austrians stopped by in Hamilton, I took some time off to explore Hamilton with Emily and also followed her on a trip to the Algonquin National Park a week later. I kind of was the driver for a bunch of English guys’n'girls, but it turned out to be a really enjoyable weekend, where I got to appreciate the different English accents I barely understood in the beginning. It was impressive to see all the lakes frozen all over the place, which I used to canoe in late October and I still can hear the ice on the lakes crack as the sun hit first their surface when it was rising! Emily was kind of leading this trip and I can’t believe how many things she was responsible for when I got to know her. She is an exchange as I am, but was involved in University like hell, basically friends with everyone, volunteering for the outdoor club, engineers without borders and I don’t know what else, playing intertube water-polo, although she is not the best swimmer, and still managed to accomplish her workload at school, which practically was double of mine. I got to learn how to drink English tea, improved my pronunciation of the word wegetable, still hard though, and started to have my regular chocolate milk at school – very nice improvements of my life!

Still exploring Hamilton (bike-ride in the botanical gardens) and school gets busier in April, but thanks to Jay I took some time off to accompany Jorden Moir and him to the RIT juggling festival, where Jorden did a really great performance on the main stage that evening. He’s simply amazing when playing with balls – “a black hole full of creativity”. We played footbag the next day and I got to see some new faces from the east coast mixed with some friends from the Chicago Jam around Xmas. We hung up at Matt Cross’ apartment and tasted some home-brewed beer, I liked this family mood a lot down there and was so happy to have joined them!

During and after that school got pretty dense and final exams drove me crazy, because I hadn’t planned any time ahead for studying. Also the project turned out to be one of the time killers in my life, it eat up easter and most of the evenings during the week, but in fact, we did a really great job and collected a prize in the end, got mentioned on several TV shows (CHCH and discovery channel) and I could show our project life in the morning show of CTV, which went around whole Ontario at least, if not Canada. I was super-excited (150bpm), but as I proved before during bungy jumping in August, I still can do jokes when excited!
We really got a lot of feedback, got mentioned at McMaster Homepage, appear in a lot of pictures from the poster day and it felt good to get this reward after 8 months of hard work. We even got a certificate for outstanding work and all, maybe I’ll frame it, my parents said so, they are super proud and all. That’s nice.

After all those events my life in Canada commenced to break apart. I had my last exam on the 26th of April, and on the same day I booked my train ride to the west-coast, Vancouver. Until this, I impressively ignored the fact of moving and enjoyed my time in Hamilton, went out, met with people, but also never really had time for anything – it was weird. In the end, of course, it was all to fast, sold all my stuff on the very last day, wrote the French exam in a mood you shouldn’t've done anything, I rushed to say good-by to everyone and hopped on the train. A big thank to Reinhard, who managed to get a bunch of friends to his place right before I left, which made me nearly cry. After a ten minutes improvised free hugging session with all of them I had to go, threw myself on the train to Chicago and had 3 days nothingness in front of me and started to write a letter. Never write a letter on the train!

Back in Vancouver, as the second one of our family I got there. My brother visited the city 5 years ago or so, and he’d told me everything about it, but i never really listened. I always want to find out myself. What I found out: Vancouver is an amazing site, and I don’t want to tell you about that mountain, sea, city combination everyone is telling you. No, I had the best time of my life on a tandem cycling through the city with Renée and just horsing around all the time. I stayed at Caro’s place that time, some footbag girl, if not to say the footbag girl in Vancouver, I really like and met in Berlin, Austria and Prague the years before. She enabled a shred-session with Allan Haggett and I was in heaven!

I transfered to Vancouver Island after 4 awesome days in the city with the ferry, which takes about one thousand trucks and cars and we all met each other in a Hotel for our big hiking adventure around the northern part of the Island. We could spend 5 days in the thickest rain-forest I’ve ever seen hiking into it for three days, hitting awesome coast lines on and off and after the third day returning to the point we’d started.
Hiking is exertive and you are modest yourself, enjoying every sunset and every step you can take without feeling any pain, overwhelmed by wicked trees, thicker, it needs more than 5 people to hug ‘em and your path is printed with footsteps from some cougars, some humans and bears. Unbelievable, if you would find a passage through these forests without a leading path and still all those animals do somehow. Unreal, if you meet one of those creatures that can call these forests truely their own (one native guy and three bears crossed our path) and you’re happy when they, like you, pay you respect and share this little nature! Thanks a lot to that one bear, which started to show interest in us as I was hiking by with 3 others back to the camp. But afterall it wasn’t to proud to leave from its food and to let us pass, as we tried to chase it of, however, we got quite close but we are still alive. Staying in the woods made you think in simple but massively important routines: Walking, stopping, drinking, walking, stopping, setting up your tents, starting the stove, gathering firewood, eating, warming, sleeping, packing, leaving, walking, and so on (compare ppl in the city). Everyday the same, but everyday on some place elsewhere.
After hiking we went for kayaking. 6 days we had to get from Vancouver Island to the Mainland where we got picked up. Jumping from one little island, which you could call your own little kingdom and we used to explore everyday anew, following the same routines we already knew from the hike, where we only replaced walking with paddleing. We dove into a scenery full of salty water, snowy mountains, foresty islands and sunny weather, the following day always beating the last day in some other way. Wandering with the tides and weather in mind, the wind showed us where to pause and the sun told us where to settle down and take a nap and the night finally ordered you when to stop for the day and rest.

In between all these you tried to paddle your way to a nice island to discover and for more nature to sight. I suppose we had some porpoises, seals and walrusses, bear shit on our campsite, a lonely deer showing up and some crabs in our bellies. The lift back with the water-taxi which took only 2 hours made me think about how brutal motorboats and our technology can cut through these scenery and how different you see the same way you take back. Caitlin faced me on the way back sitting right in front of me on the water-taxi, our guide, my good friend and together with Alec leaders of the outdoor team, cutest couple I know and most awesome road-trippers. Hope to see you next year!

Fully relying on the combustion-engine we, Will and I,  hitch-hiked from Vancouver to Calgary in two days – it needed only 3 of those engines to move our asses the whole way of about 1000km. Thanks a lot to Jon Hill, who took us the whole way from Kamloops to Calgary and stopped for everything we would like to see on the way! He was the guy! We could stay at Hannah’s place for two days in Calgary, where we got the best meal I had for two months and I felt kind of guilty eating most of it – habits you just can’t change ‘em so quickly.

We flew back to Europe starting from Calgary via Toronto and for the bored reader who expected the story being done know, I’ll have to disappoint you. There are more things to come:

We stopped in Iceland for three days and ‘we’ involves now to 2 more people: Emily and Richard who did an (I suppose) awesome trip on the east of Canada while we were shit-heading around on the other side. Renting a car and exploring the island was the plan, which we acted out quite well, although the weather was shit, rain and fog. I was the chauffeur, again, and drove the bunch of english-guys around, with Emily as the best co-driver ever. We never took a wrong turn! Three things we discovered: There are a lot of lava-rocks in Iceland, there is a lot of water going down on more waterfalls and the whole time it smells like someone is farting after eating douzens of bad eggs. Some more things we did not discover are trees and wales. The former are just not there and we wondered where Islandics get their wood from and the latter we didn’t see because staying in bed was sweeter than rushing to and back from the boat and in fact missing the bus to the airport. But for me, Iceland was not over, had just begun. Fly, land and you are in Egilsstadir, the east of Iceland, a friend of mine picked me up and I couldn’t even say a word, we were climbing up a hill to see a huge waterfall she’s never been to before, although she’s living around for half a year now. I know her from school, she decided to move to Iceland, which gave me 3 more days exploring the northern part of the island, again, driving a car, her car, sleeping in the same car for two days. Iceland rocks, got to see a lot including vulcanos, craters, boiling grounds, some wales (finally I got on a ship to watch for them) and some fjords that shape the island nicely so every city can call one their own.

Flying back out of Reykjavik with heavy weighting baggages and memories! I’ll try to never forget these days…