just jaime

(Okay so technically a plane and not a jet but the sentiment remains the same.) My flight to the Netherlands is 10 days away and while I have started to pack, I am also a chronic over-packer so this will prove difficult!! PACKING IS HARD. Things to Accomplish: - MUST. CONSOLIDATE. WARDROBE. - DO. NOT. NEED. EVERYTHING. IN. CLOSET. - ONLY. PICK. FAVOURITE. SWEATERS. NOT. ALL. OF. THEM. (this will be the hardest part). - YOU. ONLY. NEED. A. FEW. PAIRS. OF. SHOES. - SAME. GOES. WITH. COATS. - VERSATILITY. IS. KEY. I gotta pack for three seasons though! When I arrive it'll be winter and then I have to be able to transition from winter to spring (easy enough) to SUMMER. It won't get extremely hot there, but I do have to be prepared. If worst comes to worst, I can just buy what I need there but because of who I am as a person, I would like to be as prepared as I can be. AND TO ADD SALT TO THE WOUND, my favourite pair of boots just got wrecked. Prayin'  I can get the...

Happy 2018, everyone. Hope your New Year's Eve was safe and fun and that you were able to enjoy the day. That you were able to look back at all that has happened in 2017 and reflect on how you pushed through the hard times and savoured the good. That you learned something new, whether through school or new experiences. That you looked, and continue to look, towards the new year with hope and aspirations, big and small. I hope that in 2018, you discover new things: - new music - new books - new friends -- or old friends coming back into your life - new information - new goals - new details of yourself I hope that in 2018, you find love: - self-love - friendships; platonic or romantic love - in nature - and any other love you may come upon or fight for. I hope that in 2018, your dreams become reality, and if they don't get there quite yet, there is still time. I find that looking back on what happened in 2017 helps to not only discover what I need to work on,...

I don't know if it's odd that I don't really tell people about the fact that I'm leaving for exchange. I only started out telling a few friends what I was doing (or trying to do) because if I had been rejected, I would have had to tell everyone I didn't get in. When I got nominated by SFU, I used the same reasoning. "I got nominated, but I haven't been accepted by my host uni yet!" When I got accepted I said, "Well, what if for some reason my student visa doesn't work out and then I'm not allowed to study there?" -- my student visa has been recently approved, by the way, so that's good news. When I got automatically enrolled in the Formal Exchange Program (FEP) and people asked me about course selection I deflected and asked them what courses they were planning on doing instead of talking about me.  When  I was told my leave of absence of work had been approved,  some coworkers started asking questions and I almost felt...

It's kind of funny that this was the first thing I thought of to be the title because I used this as part of my senior quote back in high school. The reason why I used this quote then was because we were leaving a safe (for the most part, anyways) community and entering into a new part of our lives. Fast forward a few years and I'm using it again, but this time for a different kind of adventure! After a long, arduous process (which, to be fair, was enjoyable at times) I've been officially accepted to go on exchange! Yessiree, you read right, your girl is leaving Canada next semester and travelling to an exotic land known as: the Netherlands. The land of tulips, windmills, and cheese. As a part of SFU's Exchange Program, I will be spending my Spring semester (from January to July) in a city called Maastricht where I will be attending Maastricht University (UM) and taking courses from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS)! During this whole process, I had ...