Head Tale

Hard to believe but twenty (!) years ago today, I took off from Regina, Saskatchewan and landed in Paris, France, a couple weeks before I was set to begin a one semester exchange in York, England (where I took three courses including a Film Production class that gives us the slightly un-PC clip at the top of this post)…

With my tongue only slightly-in-cheek, I often think of those four months as the single greatest stretch of my life.  Why?

• I was young, unattached and with very few cares in the world (Kids?  Job? Mortgage?  Decades in the future!)
• I had traveled widely in North America with my parents growing up.  But this was was my first time experiencing a (slightly) different culture and different continent for the first time in my life (but fortunately one that still spoke English which made the adjustment *much* easier!)
• I was flush with cash having worked a summer job that ended up paying me, after commissions and saved per diems, more on an hourly basis than I earn today, two degrees and twenty years later!
• I happened to arrive at the height of the “Cool Britannia” movement.
• I ended up on a floor in the college dorms that had 18 women and exactly *one* other guy!  (Although I didn’t take advantage of that nearly as much as I should – I still regret hearing one floormate drunkenly told me “Oh, I fancy you, Jason” at the Student Union Pub about two weeks before I was scheduled to leave! 🙁
• The college I was at had a high number of exchange programs with Universities around the world so I got to meet exchange students from Germany, Japan and (mostly) the US.  (We were the only Canadian University to send students.)
• It was a great program where I paid my tuition and dorm fees here and someone did at the college there and we basically swapped places so you didn’t have to pay exorbitant foreign student fees like some exchange students do.

Anyhow, as I look back, I realised I’ve basically told the story of this exchange a couple times already.  So instead, I thought I’d go back to my journal from that first month in Paris/London/York and share some highlights…

• U of Regina sent five exchange students – one went a month early, two showed up the weekend before school started and myself and a female exchange student ended up traveling together a couple weeks before school was scheduled to start.
• We spent a week in Paris, a week in London then made our way to York.
• She had to go through Manchester because she thought she’d save money by carrying an extra suitcase then shipping it from Paris to York.  Turns out she spent more to do that then I did to ship a suitcase directly from Canada to York AND she had to go out of her way to pick it up while I had mine waiting for me in the Security Guard’s quarters when I arrived at the college.
• At the time, the French franc was trading at 3.5 Francs to $1 CND.  (Obviously, with the switch to the Euro, I have no idea how this compares today.  I do know a Euro is worth .67 of a Canadian dollar as I type this.)
• My Louvre admission was 40 francs (about $11.50 Canadian)
• Eiffel Tower admission was 55 francs (about $16)
• My limited French was enough to inform me that the VHS movies in a department store had different titles.  One I noted was “Home Alone” which became “Momma, I Missed The Plane” 🙂
• Ticket in the Chunnel (which had only opened the year before) from Paris to London was 350 francs ($100)
• The British pound was trading at £.48 for 1 Canadian Dollar (It’s £.49 today – how wild that twenty years later, the ratio is basically exactly the same?) 
• I basically used traveller’s cheques to get local currency everywhere I went as this was easier than trying to find ATM machines which weren’t as common back then and also, I wasn’t sure how well my Saskatchewan-based Credit Union debit card would work, even if I found an ATM.  (I later used it regularly in York and even during a trip to Amsterdam so my worries were maybe over blown?)
• It’s incredibly mind-blowing to think that a restaurant where I had what I documented as a “fairly plain chicken sandwich” is not only still open but because of the magic of the Internet, I can see their menu, photos of the place (and have a chuckle that their GarfunkelsUK Instagram handle actually looks like “GarfunkelSUK” at first glance) and if I looked hard enough, probably all kinds of other stuff too – reviews, videos, I could Like their Facebook page, follow them on Twitter, etc.!
• Bought £5 standing room only ticket to see “Starlight Express” which I thought was a pretty sweet deal, especially considering the standing room was right by the “stage” and my traveling companion and I could’ve literally reached out and tripped the performers as they skated by!
• While doing laundry in my London hostel, I get talking to another traveller from New Zealand.  She says she nannied in Vancouver then traveled across Canada with someone she met via a ride share board to Montreal.  I say I’m from Regina and she says they drove past it since they wanted somewhere cheaper.  And believe it or not, that leads to a realization that they’d stopped at the motel in Indian Head where I grew up.  What a crazy coincidence!  (I also apologized to her for how shitty and terrible the motel is in IH even if it was cheaper than staying in the city!)
• Wow – the Maple Leaf Pub is still open too.  As a proud ex-pat, I had to stop there for lunch one day!
• Buckingham Palace Tour was £8.50 – about $17.
• Ate a burger at the Hard Rock Cafe and panicked when I got back to Canada and heard about the Mad Cow Disease outbreak which started in England in 1995 (probably ate a lot of other beef during the four months I was in England too but the Hard Rock burger always stood out in my mind as the one that would give me the disease if I caught it for some reason!)
• We’d gone our separate ways for the day but ended up bumping into the person I was traveling with at Piccadilly Circus – another crazy coincidence although I guess not surprising that two tourists would end up at the same tourist hotspot independently
• Met another traveler at my hostel in York who’d was from Switzerland but had been to a pow-wow at Fort Qu’Appelle.  (Makes you wonder what happened to all the people you have these random passing encounters with?)
• I estimated that I spent about $50 CND/day during my first two weeks.  That included hostels, food and all tourist attractions.  So those Europe on $50/day books seem to be onto something! 😉
• This was my permanent address in England once I got to my college…
  • Jason Hammond
    #10 Lower New Corridor
    Lord Mayor’s Walk
    York, England
    Y03 7EX
• I budgeted $100 for film developing which is how we did it in the old days, kids!  (13 rolls of film at $8/roll)  At 24 photos per roll, that’s just over 300 photos during four months.  (Some kids today probably take that in a week with their fancy smart phones!)
• I was pleasantly surprised that the library at my UK college used the same catalogue software as I used at U of R!
• I got bumped from “American Studies” (was trying to pick classes that wouldn’t be too hard so I could focus more on other things such as traveling and partying!) and ended up in “Theology in Film & Literature” which, in hindsight, is/was a weird choice for an atheist to make.  I think it just worked best for my schedule.  Plus I got to write an essay about how Robin Williams’ character in “Good Morning Vietnam” was a Christ-figure so that was fun.
• Funny going to the bar/pubs with the American exchange students, many of whom were under 21 so had never been to any place that served alcohol
• I observed that the only things I found cheaper in the UK than in Canada were beer, chocolate bars and Dr. Marten’s shoes!

Okay, that’s enough of a trip down memory lane for now.  Wow – twenty years.  That’s just unreal to me to think it’s been that long.  I’ve obviously been on big trips since then but they’ve all been in North America and/or to hot vacation destinations in the Caribbean or whatever.

When I left England I swore I’d be back but I never would’ve guessed it would take more than twenty years for that to happen (and who knows if it ever will?  One co-worker took her family including two teenaged boys to England for six weeks and it cost *thousands* of dollars.)

Man, one big regret of my life is not doing more traveling when I was young, carefree and didn’t mind sleeping in multi-person hostel rooms for twenty bucks a night! 😉  Of course among my friends who traveled a *ton* – around the world and taught English in Japan and lived in Australia and all that stuff?  They still have the same regret that they didn’t travel enough which reminds me of how hard it is to define what “enough” is.

On that note, I guess the flip side is that I got an amazing opportunity at an amazing time in my life which many people never have – to travel to another continent, to see a few different countries (because there were so many international students at my college, we had a dedicated office which set-up many trips for us – around England and beyond.  So in addition to getting to see France when I arrived, I also got to Scotland, Amsterdam and to see every “big old thing” within a two hours’ drive of York!) 😉