#64 The final chapter

Now I've kept you waiting for quite a long time and I have to say that there are no final words for your ears - sorry.

A notice:

On December 16th (Saturday before the 3rd Advent) between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. there will be a lecture about my time in Canada. Since I don't want to simply publish the address here, there are two or three options.

1. You are in my private WhatsApp or Instagram contacts, then you will be informed of the location again in a timely manner.

2. You contact me personally and then I will give you the address.

3. You don't care about the lecture. 😅

I've been back in Germany for more than two weeks now and of course it wouldn't make sense to describe the two weeks here now, as they're nowhere near as exciting as two weeks in Canada. Unless you want to experience my experiences with the German bureaucracy, because it has completely caught up with me again. I would just like to use this post to report a little about my first time in Germany, (small) negative points about Canada and what I didn't do.

I think the decision to spend my last days in Vancouver was the right one, because it meant saying goodbye to Canada wasn't difficult for me and it couldn't be compared to saying goodbye to Tatla Lake.

Firstly, I had a cold, which limited me quite a bit, then the weather was mostly poor and then, in my opinion, Vancouver is ugly if you don't just stay in the particularly touristy places.

So on the last day before my flight in Vancouver I walked (by chance) across Hasting Street and this street simply represents what is going extremely wrong in Canada, among other things: drug policy. When you see people of all ages there with bodies atrophied from drug use, it's just frightening. I can't even describe the posture correctly, but many people simply have their upper body bent to 90 degrees and can no longer stand upright. (You can just type "Hasting Street Vancouver" into Google and look at the pictures there) When you see these people, with their open, infected wounds, their shaky hands, about to give themselves an injection or just getting off the ground Collecting the last bits of crack and then smoking it into a pipe that probably has more bacteria than any public toilet is simply horrifying.

So I have to say that this was one thing that I noticed, especially in the larger cities. Unfortunately, many people see drug intoxication as a last resort. I also suspect that many people take it because they simply had existential crises and then slipped into it, because Canada is one thing above all: expensive. So when I went shopping with friends for the first time in Germany, I was positively shocked at how cheap everything was (for my standards). There you really had a direct comparison between Canada and Germany and then you noticed how incredibly expensive Canada is and I didn't have any major expenses myself because I was in the very fortunate position of only spending everything on my own during my road trip to supply .

Of course, I don't just want to report negatively about Canada here, which doesn't fit in with my other posts at all, but the fact is that there is no such thing as a perfect country and Canada also has its dark sides. I was just lucky that I noticed very little of all the negative points, because for the most part I just lived at the bottom of the world.

Nevertheless, Canada is a country that I will always love and will definitely travel to often, because I still have a score to settle with the country: a road trip to Yukon. This is something that still weighs heavily on my heart. 🥲It's really annoying that this second road trip to the north didn't work out. How I would have loved to travel to the remote places, how I would have loved to see other wild animals and how I would have loved to see the Northern Lights. A thing that still stabs at the heart. How annoying it is that even in Germany there are more and more frequent reports of northern lights and I always had clouds when the possibility was good... simply incredibly bitter.

And of course I didn't do other things in Canada that I still have to catch up on. So I never ate the Canadian specialty poutine, which consists of fries, cheese and gravy. I haven't dealt with the indigenous population far enough and would have liked to have learned more from them, their culture and their history. Because the stories I heard about indigenous people were always said by non-indigenous people. I have absolutely no interest in politics in Canada. But there was also a very simple reason for that: “The world is coming to an end.” No matter which news portal you use, in the end it's all about war and suffering and why should I subject myself to this bad news when I have paradise in front of me my front door had. So I only dealt minimally with political news (and then only German news). Of course I don't want to give the impression that everything was bad, definitely not. I will always say that Canada and my time there was an absolute gift and, in my eyes, a privilege that I will never forget. With this last post I just wanted to briefly point out that not everything is perfect in this incredibly beautiful country.

Oh, and one thing I could have done differently was my English. I think it goes without saying that I can now speak English 😁, BUT (!) it's not perfect! I have to be honest and say that I didn't put enough effort into it, because at some point the priority of learning English became less and less because there were so many other things that my brain wanted to absorb. Of course it's annoying, but my goal was never to come home with perfect English (otherwise I'll have to teach English here at some point in a different subject 😂) Considering that I previously had the level of a primary school student, my English is significantly better and therefore I am happy with myself and that is the most important thing.

There is one more thing that strikes me that may be negative. It's just very expensive to fly to Canada and I don't think we need to talk about the environmental factor. When I calculated my CO² compensation it turned out that I caused almost two tons of CO² simply through this flight, which is simply an unbelievable amount. Everyone has to decide for themselves and of course a long-haul flight is not for everyone.

But how were my first days back in Germany?

As I said, it wasn't difficult for me to say goodbye, which was also because we flew straight into the clouds and I simply didn't see anything else (except for a brief moment of the Rocky Mountains) and after an hour it was dark.

When I arrived in Germany, I was immediately greeted with a “typical German cliché”: constant complaining. I hadn't even gotten to the baggage claim yet and I was already annoyed because I had already met people on this short journey who simply (in my opinion) insulted the airport staff for no reason, when I really thought to myself: Welcome to Germany. This “complaining culture” continued at baggage claim. I also thought to myself: Just be grateful that you landed safely after about 9 ½ hours, instead of getting upset that your luggage is taking a little longer. You can't change it anyway.

I was picked up at the airport by friends who I stayed with for the first two nights. When we went shopping together, I was really amazed at the prices. Somehow my brain immediately compared everything and it went something like this in my head: Wow, that costs €2.50 here, so in Canada it would have cost the equivalent of more than CAD 6.

What was also really crazy was that theoretically I was missing a day because I flew out on Wednesday but didn't land until Thursday. My brain was really busy with that. What also happened often, especially in the first two days, was that I got upset about people who spoke German, simply because my brain was still so geared towards English and I always thought to myself: That doesn't exist, another one German person. 😅 Very strange, but luckily it subsided quickly. 😂

Otherwise I just had the typical jet lag problem, such as being tired a lot. In fact, this continued until a few days ago, so that I suddenly became extremely tired during the day, but then I was wide awake at 6 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep. What I often had was the thought that it was 3 p.m. where I was and it was midnight where you were in Germany, until I remembered that we were all in the same time zone again. 😅 I had the strangest situation when I was out for a walk and a fallen tree trunk “appeared” behind a bush and my brain suddenly said: Be careful, a black bear! 😂 Somehow my brain was still wired to: absolute caution and immediate reaction. 😂

Yes, but that was actually it. After I visited a few friends, I went to my parents' house and I'm living here again for now. I am of course grateful that my parents live in the village, because I now escape the constantly increased noise and still have the opportunity to go for a walk in peace.

And before I write the last lines here, one more thing about my beard and hair. I haven't shaved my beard or my hair in all my time in Canada. Since you're supposed to have a well-groomed appearance as a teacher, I would of course never have been able to grow my beard or hair like that while on active duty, so I simply used this time as an experiment. It's really fascinating how people look at you when you walk down the street with a long (and yes, very unkempt) beard. Very often I received looks that felt like they directly conveyed to me the derogatory thoughts in that person's head. 😅 So at some point in Canada I started smiling constantly and people actually sometimes smiled back. 😊😁 That was always much better than receiving judgmental looks. 😅 And even though I know how incredibly sexy I looked with my beard 😏😅 it had to come off. But I kept my hair. I regularly donated blood and plasma, have an organ donor card and am a member of the DKMS. So I'm very willing to donate parts of my body (sounds a bit strange 😅) because there are so many people who rely on all these donations and are much worse off. People who suffer from cancer and lose their hair due to chemotherapy or other causes often suffer from this. For these people, a wig is like a second skin. That's why I decided (even though my hair really annoys me, I have to be honest! 😂) to let my hair continue to grow until it's long enough to donate. For me at some point it will just be a visit to the hairdresser, but for a sick person it can be an extreme psychological relief. That's why I kept my long hair. Oh, and if you have long hair, but maybe. If you want to try out a short hairstyle, you can also consider making a donation. Your hair will grow back anyway.

I would like to use the last lines, which now introduce the final end of the post, to say thank you.

Thanks to every single person who read or heard my post. Some have sometimes cheered me up when I wasn't feeling so well, others have (rightly) been upset about the length of my posts 😂 and others have simply told me that they liked my writing style.

Thank you for indirectly accompanying me throughout all this time. This blog was an attempt to bring you a little closer to my Canadian life, even if the beauty of the country does not 100% reflect what I was able to experience, either verbally or photographically.

I hope I was able to entertain, cheer you up or distract you with my total of 65 posts (280 Word pages) and over 2160 pictures. It was a pleasure for me.

So I now close these chapters and wish you all the best for your future path, wherever it takes you.💚

Take care. Love who you want to love and never apologize for being yourself and protect nature to the extent you can. She is too beautiful to be destroyed.

Samuel