Big Dreams

Chapter 2: The C plan

I had a lot of opinions and I really liked to talk to express them all. I talked about culture, religions, and life in general, even things I didn't know much about such as politics, I liked to discuss with those who had them, and I also researched a lot about what I didn't know. But what I really loved was talking about people and how they lived and thought, what were their beliefs, perspectives of life, motivations, projects, experiences, opinions on a wide variety of subjects from euthanasia and abortion to poverty in African countries.

I wanted to have important and substantial conversations like that with everybody and not just about how things were in Portugal but around the globe. However, my grandma was not like me (this was clearly not a family thing, I know) and she had no interest in talking or visiting other places unless the place was Portugal. "It is our country, I don't care about the others" or "I don't even know my whole country, that's what I'd like to visit, not another country that is not mine" were some of her comments that made me more confused because how is it that in such big world, full of wealth far beyond money, could not be interesting to anyone? That was beyond my understanding.

I wanted to travel the world, to go to every country I could and it was one of my biggest dreams. I thought people learned a lot about life while they were in touch with different cultures and ways of living. I wanted that for me and my future children. Maybe this was one of the reasons why I and her didn't get along well, we had very different opinions, she couldn't take people that didn't like the country and she didn't even admit that Portugal actually had a lot of things wrong. I thought that was exactly one of the worst things: not admitting.

I used to say that I wanted to leave the country but I think no one ever took me seriously. I followed people on Instagram that had gone away and I wished I was them, I even imagined myself living in some countries and thinking if I could like it there.

I got in touch with Canada through Trina, my college friend, when we were talking about the Erasmus+ program, an exchange program for students from all over the world, and she told me she wanted to go there and my first reaction was saying "no, there are better places" when the truth was I didn't know almost anything about that country.

At that time, the only country I had thought about studying, and maybe living in was England, but with Brexit things got a little complicated. I wanted to go to an English-speaking country, not because I was fluent yet, but because I already knew some things and I didn't want to have to learn a whole new language from scratch.

Trina told me that Canada was her dream trip and convinced me that it was a good country to have some classes and that the place was amazing in many other ways. My dream trip was to Hawaii but I knew I couldn't go there on the Erasmus+ program and I wanted to do that trip in another way: I imagined going with friends on a big vacation.

Curious about Canada after that conversation, when I got home that day, I did what any 19 years old would do: I googled it. But I didn't search for Canada right away, I decided to type something like "What are the countries with the best quality of life?". I'm not sure why I did that, I guess I just wanted to find the best possible thing for myself, or at least dream about the best one. However, it didn't matter how I searched it because Canada appeared in every way.

I remember the next question I asked Google was "What are the best countries to work as a pharmacist?" and then I compared the two lists. And Canada was also there: one of the countries with the best quality of life and with big perspectives for pharmacists. Of course, it wasn't the only one that got my attention, the UK was also there but well you already know what I thought about that. And then I got in touch with another one I never really thought of: Australia.

After that, those two countries -Canada and Australia- didn't get out of my head, so I had to know more and more about them: what did it really mean to be one of the countries with the best quality of life??