Culture Camp

Surprise! I'm not in Nicaragua yet. I'm in a hotel near the Toronto airport waiting to get into the airport at 3:30 in the morning.

I'm with 17 other youth who are travelling to Nicaragua with Canada World Youth. 9 of them will be going to Somoto, a place with 40,000 people, and the rest of us will be going to Estelí, a much larger town (population 120,000). It seems like a really fun, dynamic group from all over Canada. We'll be working with Funarte (click on link for a 5-minute youtube video of the amazing organization).

So for these past few days I've been at Edgewood camp in Eden Mills immersing myself in an intercultural/orientation camp. I've also been learning some Spanish so soon I will be writing some Spanish on here!

We stayed up on Friday night (it was Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day so the people of Quebec were itching for a beer) and had a sort of sober nightclub going on. In the outdoor chapel we danced with an iPod and computer speakers as the DJ, we used flashlights for strobe lights and all people could blame their behaviour on were the marshmallows they'd eaten a few minutes before.

Although the median age of the group is 21, as we got on the bus to come from the camp to the hotel, people were eating candy (Mentos and Lick-n-Dips), drinking from juice boxes and making signs for passing trucks to honk their horns. It's weird how I forgot all about those things until I experienced them again. Once you leave childhood behind it takes other people to remember it for you.

Ignorance

More than a few people gawked when I told them I'm going to Nicaragua without knowledge of Spanish. It may be I'm highly ignorant, which is the worst way to travel, and maybe I shouldn't even 'deserve' to go to a country without having learned some of their language, and it's even worse since I studied linguistics. Maybe, maybe not.

I tell people, "I'm going to Nicaragua."
They say, "Do you know any Spanish?"
"No."
"Are you going to learn any?"
"Not much before I go. I've got phrasebooks and a dictionary and that's it."
"How long are you going for?"
"Three months."
"Estás muerto."

The problem with learning foreign languages for me is the lack of contact with the living language. All throughout elementary and high school we talked our way through fake conversations with other foreign language learners and a teacher who may or may not be a native speaker of French. I've given up on learning languages unless I'm in the country. I have to disconnect my mind from, "I'm memorizing these words because..." and connect the words and phrases and grammar I'm learning towards something that is communicable and understandable and will get me something, either allow me to convey some information or give me some useful information.

I sort of wish I'd learned more Icelandic while in Iceland, but only sort of. Does that make me sound ignorant? Unless I have a real motivation to do it, and that comes out of need to communicate. Proof of this comes from people who went on Rotary exchanges during high school. Usually they were immersed into situations where no one else knew or would speak English to them and they adamantly must speak the host language. I wish I had that experience. All I've had experience with as a foreign language is my mangled French and my broken Cantonese. I know that I can get by in my world with only English, but if I want to get out of my world I recognize that English alone is not, is never sufficient. But not travelling because you're afraid of language barriers or you're afraid of looking ignorant is worse than not knowing the language.

Anyway, it's true that the more prepared one is, the more smooth of an integration I'll have into another culture. I'm defensive about my choice to purposely lack preparation, but that's for me to worry about and for you to not call me ignorant.

Traveling without knowing the language doesn't have to be a disadvantage: In Defense of Ignorance

The Countdown Begins

I'm posting here just for the sake of posting here. There is exactly one month before I leave Toronto for my Canada World Youth adventure. I've gotten my shots, I've learned a couple of phrases of Spanish - I'm planning to dive head-first into language immersion. It's the most natural way, for me anyway. I've told some people from Latin America that I'm going there without any knowledge of Spanish. They responded with horror on their faces, I've read up on some of the history/culture of Nicaragua (okay fine I read the first part of a Lonely Planet book. And a kids' book, part of series of Introduction to the Countries of the World type of thing).

I feel as if I'm missing something else to prepare me for this, but how does one go about preparing to travel, exactly? There's the packing. There's the documentation. There's the language and history learning. Sometimes there's the shift in mindset. In any case, I travel to adapt, change, go with the flow. I am of the opinion that underpreparation is better than overpreparation.

Edit: I've included a countdown widget:

Nicaragua! and Alberta (!)

Yesterday I was walking around downtown Toronto, half sick with the flu, tired, congested, headache-prone. I thought, "I'll go home early, eat something small, go to bed."
Before I went to bed I had to e-mail something to my employer. I switch on the computer, log onto my e-mail (yeah, I'm so behind in the times in this sense. no simply checking my Blackberry for me) and scan my messages. Delete, delete, delete. Then I read an e-mail with the subject line 'Congratulations!' Woah, how did this get through my spam filter?
Then I read more: 'Congratulations! You've been selected for a position on the following exchange...June: Nicaragua. September: Alberta.'

I'd signed up for the Canada World Youth program and thought that I wasn't going to get placed, but I did and now I am excited. I didn't end up getting much sleep last night and now I'm more sick than ever before but I hope the magic of exciting travel times will heal me soon enough!

The program
For those who don't know, Canada World Youth gives youth (comme moi) a chance to live in another community in Canada for 3 months and in a developing country for another 3 months. I'll be in with a group of 17 other youth, 9 in total from the other country and 9 Canadians. For the whole 6 months I will be living with host families with a person from Nicaragua. For the 6 months we will be volunteering for and serving the needs of the host community. I will be working with the FUNARTE organization based in Esteli. It's meant to foster tolerance and diversity and leadership skills...It sounds really structured but I'm hoping to learn a lot from it.

Rest of San Francisco

I just realized that I never finished my travelogue concerning San Francisco. Oops! Well, I had such a fun and busy time the last few weeks I was there that I simply forgot.

Well, I bought and read American Gods by Neil Gaiman because having travelled for 40 hours over four days in a bus over the American land I had a real craving for a story about America. I would recommend it to anyone who has a craving for the United States of America.

For the last few days I was in San Francisco my kind relatives took me on a tour of the Bay Area - we went to the University of California at Berkeley campus. They have a really pretty campus - it helps that they have sun and no snow year round - and a gorgeous library. We went to a North Face outlet store where I bought really cute boots. We went to have a buffet lunch. We went to the Jelly Belly jelly bean factory and I came out smelling like cinnamon. In all seriousness I hadn't tasted Jelly Belly beans in about a decade and would've forgotten that they existed were it not for this trip. Thanks for bringing memories of my childhood back! The next day, we went to Muir Woods, site of the redwoods. It was very pretty and I wished I lived nearby. The thing about San Francisco is that there is such close access to the outdoors - it took my relatives 30 minutes to drive to Muir Woods. If I drove for 30 minutes I would still be either in Pickering (suburbs), Barrie (suburbs), downtown Toronto (city), or Mississauga (suburbs). There is no good natural areas in the GTA - you have to really take a weekend or two off to go somewhere nice.

That ends my San Francisco travelogue.