What a busy month . I'm probably the luckiest person in the world, or I was. Not every day you find a Venezuelan who got a Canadian visa AND landed a COMPUTER SCIENCE internship almost at the same time. Actually, the visa thing was easier than you could guess, as I went to Toronto to study English (yes) at the UofT, so it wasn't a big deal to demonstrate that, hey, I know that I don't live in my home country that has been through an immigration crisis for the last 20 years, and we got one of the worst natural disasters in our history just a few days ago, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to overstay in my visa please give me . After I sent everything, I just went to Reddit to see how people were doing with their own visa processes, and it was HELL. Mostly because more than half of them are Indians and if you know a little about the migration in Canada, especially over the last few years, you know how big of a problem it is right now with indians and study permits. Inside that Reddit there was only desperation and void, nothing really useful to my very particular context, as I couldn't find anyone with a similar situation. Apparently, most Latino Americans that apply for a Canadian visa don't post anything about it on reddit. The thing is that I got my visa and went to study in Toronto for a whole month while having, at the same time, my first month at my new (and paid) internship. I was looking for a paid job for MONTHS, as I still need some credits to graduate that I can only get by doing some work hours at a company, and I wanted to have some of my own money, even if I liked to consider myself as a very frugal person that doesn't touch at all the money that my parents give me for personal expenses. I actually ended up changing my whole thesis, so I wasn't that invested in sending CVs, looking for offers, or trying to improve my portfolio and my curriculum in any other way . On the best days, I would just open Linkedin fo 5 minutes, give some likes to a few posts, and skim some job offers and apply for only 2 or 4 of them. It wasn't even one of those days when I saw my job position. I was bored in class, I remembered that I should apply for some jobs, opened the app, went to the job section, saw the offer and the company (I have a friend working there that talks really good things about them), saw that it was an internship position, applied, and closed the app. That was enough. I went through 3 interviews: the technical one, RRHH, and the last one with the CEO. After the technical I got the email saying that my visa was approved, and I was like, ok, I'm happy, but if I got the job, I'm going to be happier. I had to talk with RRHH about my travel and my classes, everything is remote, so there wasn't any problem with that, and they said they could adapt to my schedule so there weren't any problems at all. The trip actually helped me to talk with the CEO. The interview was solely to see if there was a cultural fit, where he told me that right now they're very focused on internationalization. He found it intersting that I was going abroad to study, and even part of the interview was in English, something that I wasn't expecting but that I did well at the end. Finally, I landed a paid internship and, a remote one, no more and no less . I'm not going to lie, the work actually affected in some way the way I enjoyed the travel. It wasn't funny, and it even made me cry because of the stress. In my opinion, they just threw me a task with a deadline that was impossible to achieve for me, a literal newcomer that had to learn how they work, what they use, and how everything is built, because IT IS very different. They have a lot of abstraction, use tools that it was my first time hearing about them, and being a full-stack just means that I have a lot of shit to look for. I got severely overwhelmed, and it affected me to the point that my classmates and my teacher (I'm going to miss you, Nabila) saw how stressed I was after only 2 weeks of knowing each other. I couldn't do and visit some places because of it, and it is a shame, but it's just an occupational hazard. Toronto was amazing. If by any chance there's someone from Toronto reading this, know that even with the problems of Toronto, it was like heaven for me. It literally excels in the things that I hate the most about my current city: the people and the transportation . The stereotypes of Canadians being really polite are true. They have a lot of consideration for others, really empathic fellas. It just blows my mind how they wait for you to cross the street (yes, they don't do that here) , and especially how they stop that far away from you and give you a lot of space. It's a society built on respect and mutual trust. You only have to see how public transportation works there. It's up to you to tap your card when you board the bus, nobody is going to tell you anything if you don't do it (only the fare inspector if you are un/lucky, because I never saw one of them). Paying for using the train is crazy too, the fucking pole to pay is almost hidden on the platform, AND you only tap when you arrive at your destination. Literally a week after I arrived back to my city, I had to take the equivalent of the TTC buses and, after tapping the card, you need to go through a fucking turnstile inside the bus that is PACKED as fuck with no AC, people that don't let you going to the end of the bus even if you ask, and people with slug complexes hugging the whole pole so it's you and the gravity trying not to fall . Only remembering the metro, the streetcar, and the buses makes me cry. I fucking love when cities have a decent public transport, and definitely Toronto is one of them (even with the delays). Also, after one month living there, I only heard a klaxon like 5 times and no more. Sorry to repeat myself again, but that's crazy. Obviously, not everything is perfect there. Expensive asf, the weather in winter does some crazy things (summer not so much), no entry-level jobs, or jobs at all, what the fuck is the deal with not adding the tax in the price tag you fucking psychos, and don't get me start with the tip culture there. But hey, I want those problems more than the ones that I have in my third-world hole with our decreasing quality of live . I'm not going to go into in details of my travel, or at least not now, but the summary is that I loved Toronto and I'm going to miss it. I hope someday my parents have the opportunity to visit it, because it's just another level of living. About my English (because that's literally my main reason to go there), unfortunately, I have to say that it didn't improve that much, or I think it didn't . Everything was focused on speaking, and that's ok, but I wanted to improve more in my grammar and the way I phrase things in general rather than only my speaking. I was just expecting something different. I practiced my speaking before even having the idea of studying abroad, something that helped me a lot with my fluency. I think I didn't have many problems trying to give my opinions and expand on them in an effective way. Obviously, I have my thicc Spanish accent and some pronunciation problems, but I think the program didn't help me with any of those and it was only an excuse to have to speak English all the time . At least in my case, as I was the only Spanish speaker in the whole fucking building, unlike my Chinese classmates that ended up speaking Chinese between themselves . Well, the conclusion is that I have to sit and grab a grammar book, farm Anki and actually use the vocabulary and structures. What a surprise!!! Yesterday I was looking into my first post, and I'm sorry to everyone that expected F1 or videogame content HAHAHA, I swear I wanted to focus on that. Don't worry, a friend of mine gifted me Undertale, as we are going to the Undertale Symphony and he didn't want me to larp that hard, so wait for an Undertale review or something