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Traveling is innately interlaced within my genetics, an intangible inheritance passed down by my grandparents, that remained dormant until I turned 20 years-old. That August, I headed to the outskirts of Toronto as an Au Pair in a 5-hour passage scramble of first-time-solo-flying mistakes and lonely, awkward sobs. A couple of days following my arrival, my host family and I set course to a camping ground, passing fields of crops like: soybeans, corn and tobacco, grown only during the wintertime. The overwhelming amount of northern nature plaguing even the uttermost edges of space felt overwhelming for a city girl; colossal-sized trees saturated the already frondocious forest where the possibility of encountering bears and coyotes was too bizarre to be real. The following week, I paced directionless for 4 hours in surprisingly humid summer weather, trekking along camouflaged town squares with no chain-like stores in sight, but a neglected-looking thrift store with a ripe smell where I was I purchased an XL short sleeve top to counter the heavy wardrobe in my suitcase for the cold I had naively anticipated. And as my day came to a close, a “CENTRAL LIBRARY” sign crossed my path; it was big and modern, and the only place that currently had wifi. I didn’t know it then, but it would soon become a reunion point for me. I then hit the two week mark, so I asked to be excused from my duties for the afternoon, and ventured in a 40minute walk to the petite downtown. It faced a fantastic view of lake Ontario that offered a dock with lookout benches and a park edging the water in ample magnitude. Within, I encountered local eateries and starter boutiques, yet my favorite find was A Different Drummer bookstore, as it felt authentic to its small town surroundings: from an older woman as the owner, to a reading nook hidden at the top of a spiral staircase, to the variety of editions shown for classic books- it felt special. After my buy, I made my way to perhaps the most commercial locale in the area, Coffee Culture, to enjoy a cup of tea and write about my experience adventuring; I felt ethereally dizzy. Deciding to head home, I confronted my biggest challenge yet: conquering the bus. In my city, I don’t use public transportation. When the driver stopped for me, she taught me where to stand to wait for pickup and where to insert the change when I was embarrassed; later, an old man taught me to pull on the yellow cable to pull on the yellow cable hanging over the windows to request a stop. Eventually, the blur of anxiety holding back my breath from its full capacity, left me alone. Nearly a month after my arrival, we finally made our way to the city for a brief visit until I was spontaneously dropped off in the middle of the street and told to return wherever I wanted. Shocked, I began wandering around Toronto for hours without knowing where to go and how. My accomplishments for the day were blank beyond a sense of isolation as a misfit. At nighttime, I headed to the train station. I’d never seen so many people commuting from work as casually, watching Netflix or reading as if fast trains weren’t a traveling luxury. We don’t have these in my country. As my three-month run came to an end, I reflected and remained perplexed as to how this tiny town on the fringes of Canada offered a better quality of life than I had the imagination to understand- a place where everything was simple and correct and well thought out. But overall, I thought about my growth there, how you even have to learn how to explore and how many hardships I had endured during this time and how much I would miss it. I took my last deep breath from the backyard of my then-house, surrounded by trees, wildlife and chilly air and I knew that my life had been altered permanently.