LeeMobile

So I just got back from a week-long trip back to Alberta two days ago

The main reason for my leaving was that my grandmother from Vietnam had flown into Edmonton to visit my family.  She’s over 80, and for a Vietnamese person that’s considered to be really old.  Lack of proper health care and nutrition often means you don’t live as long as most westerners do.

So I flew back to visit her, as the only time I have ever been with her was 6 years ago when I was in Vietnam.  And, who knows when I’ll ever see her again.

She’s doing well and she seems very strong still, and definitely still sharp mentally. I was really glad to have flown back to see her, and we took her to see the Rockies.  How could you visit Canada and not visit the mountains!

Well, the trip was good mostly for eating, sleeping, and lounging around.  It was a little boring to be honest, as I’m so used to doing some kind of activity while there.  Just doing absolutely nothing grew tiresome pretty quickly.  But still, it was a good reunion of sorts as I haven’t been to the Rockies with my whole family since I was little.

Other than that I caught up with a few of my friends. It was great to see them again.  What was really common between us all, was that we missed school in some way.  Mylore and I even spent an hour walking around campus, through the halls of ye-old-faithful Comp Sci building, and through all the major student hubs.  The faces around seemed younger than I remembered, but school still felt like home.  It was refreshing to be back on campus.

Being back home in Edmonton was a little strange at first.  Strange in that it felt as though nothing had changed there, but that I myself have changed.  I guess I’ve resolved that Ottawa is now “home”, and that my suburban-office-working lifestyle is my new life.  A part of me still resides in Edmonton though, a more rambunctious and raw form of me.  If my Ottawa friends think I’m an asshole, they haven’t seen me in my truest form.  I miss it.

There’s another part that lives there too; a bit that’s more spiritual, contemplative, and introspective.  Those qualities seem to serve a lesser purpose out East while I live in the plastic world of cookie-cutter homes, dinner parties, and white collared conservatives.  Suburbia is not as bad as I make it out to be, and I don’t really dislike it all that much.  It’s really really comfortable after all.  It just feels, well… a little shallow.

In the end of it all, it felt nice to be back in my home in Ottawa.  Definitely an enjoyable trip out West, but I really feel like my life in Ottawa is now really where I belong.  Selling out?  Maybe I’m just growing up.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.