Rep Your Flag

Middle row Seb (belgium) John (UK) Aissa (Swaziland) Sanda (Belgim and Italy) Eoin (Ireland) and bottom right Jamie (Australia)

I'm slowly realising that a classic misapprehension of the year abroad is that you will actually hang out with local people- in fact they seem to be some of the hardest people to find! The exchange students tend to gravitate towards each other which makes a lot of sense- we are all far from home and have the same total disregard for school work in favour of exploring Canada!

The MISN recently organised a rep your flag party which pretty much did what it said on the tin really. We all wore our colours with pride and I decided to support my Scottish roots for the night- it tends to confuse people here when I say I study in Scotland but live in England, that is if they even know where Edinburgh... got to keep things simple. It was also a fun little experiment to see how many other Scots were about- actually only about 4!

The party itself was a generic, North American movie scene to be honest. Loud music, red cups, some pretty drunk teenagers (lots of people here have come up to study from the US and are only just getting used to being able to drink legally for the first time!) so it felt a lot like being 18 again. Not necessarily a bad thing but not something I was to repeat on a regular basis... I'm getting too old for that!

My main reason for mentioning the party (other than to show off my fantastic face paint!) was to introduce some of my close friends here in Montreal! All have been named and shamed in the top picture- Montreal definitely wouldn't be the same without them.