Showing all posts tagged The Great White North 🇨🇦

Winter Wonderland
In Days in Edmonton, Overcasted Mind, Wanderlogue

Winter Wonderland

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Winter has witnessed me blossoming into a better version of myself, and the opposite. It’s the season where I got to explore new boundaries of what I was capable of feeling. Some of my best days indeed involved a sight of endless pile of white ice, but some of the worst did as well. It has seen some of my loudest laughs and some of my worst cries, and every confusion in between. It brought along some of the days that I’d miss a lot, and some others that I’d rather completely forget. Winter, for me, was a time of…

A handwritten note from the Atlantic
In (Perhaps) Fiction, Adventure of a Lifetime, Wanderlogue

A handwritten note from the Atlantic

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Summer, 2017 It was a summer of green plateau and turquoise ocean when I had my first, and possibly last, Acadian crush. He was a married man with a pair of the clearest blue-hazel eyes I’d ever seen in a person, and dark curly hair with slight golden tips hidden underneath a grey hat that made him look much younger than he actually was. Luca Gauthier and I ventured into the Acadian, boreal, and taiga forests of Cape Breton Highland that morning of July 13th. He brought an apple in his blue backpack, and a tiny container of almond, ham…

Maybe I’d rather become a minority
In Thoughtful Enlightenment

Maybe I’d rather become a minority

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A friend was once telling me about an Indonesian Muslim family that she knew back when she was still residing in a western country. The Mom is both religiously very devoted and yet open-minded at the same time, and she managed to raise her very young kids to be sharing similar traits. These kids pray, fast, and do all the obligatory deeds even though they were the only kids doing that in their school. At that time, I was wondering, ‘What she did was such a job. Was it not difficult to raise that kind of family in a country…

“Befriend” them, even if you’re scared to.
In Days in Edmonton, Thoughtful Enlightenment

“Befriend” them, even if you’re scared to.

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Awhile back, I came across a blog post that was becoming somewhat viral at that moment, particularly among the Indonesian students overseas. It was written by an Indonesian student residing in a European country, who was describing how she always finds that the majority of Indonesians in that country seem to have always been only socializing with their own communities of Indonesians and rarely seem to be engaged with either the locals or the more internationally diverse communities. P.s.: she belonged to the opposite group. For her, maybe her comfort zone is indeed in the circle of the locals. For…

Winter in Canadian Rockies
In Days in Edmonton, Wanderlogue

Winter in Canadian Rockies

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It was my first travel with the U of A Outdoors Club without my usual pals of the club. I remembered that I decided to go, even without telling them that I signed up because I knew that I had to find a new circle. Whether I liked the idea or not, I had to develop a new comfort zone. People who would get along well with me, and maybe share the same passion or interest with me too, to make it easier. Of course then this trip made the perfect sense. First of all, it was the Outdoors Club, whom…

On missing the only institution where I was actually happy to be unhappy
In Days in Edmonton, Overcasted Mind

On missing the only institution where I was actually happy to be unhappy

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Today was Saturday, but I forced myself to head to my office at the university anyway. As a home person, I would obviously rather work from the comfort of my own desk in my house if I could, but I could not. I just wouldn’t be able to be concentrate somehow, and so the only other option is the university because it’s the only other place where I could still practice my 5-time prayers. So, to the office I went. I started pretty late in the noon, so I finished up pretty late as well. Even though it was a Saturday. By…