Enjoying Fall in Vancouver

October 13, 2019

Enjoying Fall in Vancouver

For Canadians, today is the day before Thanksgiving, which I get to take advantage of by having the day off tomorrow. If I was still in high school it seems I would have had it off anyways for Columbus Day, but Thanksgiving here outweighs Columbus Day back in the States and campus is largely deserted for the weekend. Most students went home for the long weekend, at least those that live close enough, including Amy and a lot of my other friends. The room has been quiet and it's strange to eat most meals alone, but it has been nice in some ways to be forced to spend some time alone catching up on schoolwork and rest. This week I had yet another midterm (computer science), and the stressful energy still hangs in the air here, as most people have quite a few more to come in the next few weeks. I have a bit of a break before my next exam, but after that it's several more weeks filled with midterms. It seems at that point it will almost be time for finals, too. Thankfully, I have been able to manage my workload so far and have had plenty of time to do things outside of the school day, which recently has included playing a lot of guitar!

While most of my week was filled with the normal mix of classes and hanging out with friends, this weekend I've been trying to take advantage of the extra time off. Thursday and Friday evenings I went out with friends for dinner, and yesterday I went into Kitsilano and over to Main Street with my friend Mia to go thrifting. We spent a while at different shops and just walking around the areas, stopping to get boba in between. Main Street has a bunch of cool murals; signage on a few of them mentioned the Vancouver Mural Festival in 2017 which leads me to believe they were all painted fairly recently and around the same time.

Today has been my productive day of the weekend, and I spent the morning doing laundry and cleaning and getting some work done, and I'll head over to the grocery store soon. I'm hoping to get most of what I need to done today so tomorrow I can go on a hike in North Vancouver! While running some errands earlier today, I stopped to take some pictures of the foliage here. While the concept of the trees changing colors is not anything new to me as it is for some of my friends, it's still beautiful to see the campus become so much more orange and red. Just from my window I get a whole spectrum of colors, and it's quite the sight when juxtaposed with the dark mountains you can see from other places on campus.

Another thing I've been doing this weekend is a social media cleanse. I found myself constantly turning to my phone, most often Instagram and Snapchat, whenever I had a spare second, and I was tired of spending so much time on my phone doing nothing but scrolling and waiting for people to respond to me. While I'll probably pull up Facebook on my laptop to post this, I have avoided all social medias since Friday night, which has been easy considering I deleted the apps off my phone. I thought I would notice more of a change in my life by getting rid of the apps, and while I definitely notice that I'm not checking my social media, I've been surprised how few times I've gone to try to open the apps or wished I could check them. I'm realizing how little they really mean to me, and that I've used them more as a distraction than something constructive. I probably will redownload them on Tuesday to see if I can have them there without being tempted to open them every few minutes, but I hope that I'll be much more mindful about how often I'm using social media and for what.

I hope any Canadians reading this have a great Thanksgiving, and for everyone else I hope you're enjoying fall, whatever that may be where you live!