Every year, the Travel Committee at Lund’s Association of Foreign Affairs arranges two international trips for the purpose of bringing its members out into the world. Neither my co-head Max nor I had ever been to Canada when we decided on it as our fall trip destination, but Canada has made international news a lot this year and its relations with the European Union are growing steadily closer.
When planning this trip, we sought out contrasts. Canada is rife with them, whether politically, linguistically, or even in terms of climate: we arrived to lovely fall weather and left in the middle of a snowstorm. To capture this variation, we decided to visit two cities: Ottawa and Montréal. In Ottawa, the primarily anglophone capital of Canada, half of the people sitting around you at a comedy show work for MPs, government agencies, or in various invisible roles that keep the political machine running. Walking around Parliament Hill felt like being transported back across the Atlantic to England, with its castle-like architecture and well-manicured lawns.
If Montréal bore any resemblance to England, it was specifically to Notting Hill, but only in parts. Stepping away from Montreal’s cosmopolitan city center and into the Plateau neighborhood meant swapping skyscrapers for rows of colorful townhouses, and noisy construction sites for small, rectangular neighborhood parks where the fall leaves hadn’t yet been raked off the paths.
We managed to capture Canadian society’s many facets in our site visits: a non-partisan think tank, two prestigious universities, repeated (for some of us) visits to the House of Commons, a hockey game, fine arts galleries, bagel places, and not least the quintessential visits to the Swedish embassy and Swedish enterprises. There are a lot of things that our group would love to tell you about, and I have stitched together some of their accounts of the trip here.
Best,
Sabina Rameke
Head of the Travel Committee
Read more about the Travel Committee’s journey to Canada and their impressions & experience on The Perspective’s website!
Recent Comments