JoelNothman.com

I have a decision to make. I have confirmed that it is technically possible for me to stay in Montreal for another semester. After all, four months studying here is not so long to take in the opportunities of the area (seeing Montreal, Canada, North-Eastern America), and staying longer will let me see more, do more, solidify relationships, yield to people’s cries not to go so soon, and do the other half of a fascinating course in the History of Jewish Bible Interpretation… And now is the only time I can do it.

At the same time, I miss a lot in Sydney: my family, my friends, my teachers, my organisations (like the Madrigal Society, Or Chadash, AUJS, USyd School of IT, Sydney Jewish Choral Society, the I Love Joel Club (not that I’m a member)…), and it probably won’t be long before I miss the weather (although we’re having a warm streak at 15°C which is about the same as Sydney at the moment). I miss the food, the restaurants, the culture, the atmosphere. But these are all things that, more or less, I can return to either in March or in July, and (hopefully) will still be there.

Sydney is a sea of opportunities for me. I’m already booked in for some singing with the Sydney Jewish Choral Society in March; Galina posted me (a little by default) as AUJS USyd secretary; and I’m assured chazanut jobs for Pesach: The congregation in Surfer’s Paradise that I was chazan for this year keeps wailing for my return. Staying might mean I push back plans to get formal voice training. And here I can’t do any computational linguistics studies that might then be relevant to an honours thesis in 2008. (I only just confirmed that I should actually be able to do computer science subjects here, despite what I thought, but no academics here are into computational linguistics—well, they are at Concordia University down the road…)

Montreal maybe also has opportunities. I haven’t found that many of them that I can actually hold up on a long term. And while I mention long term: four months seem short, but eight months maybe is too long, and mean eleven months altogether away from all I know and love…

This also impacts on my travel plans after the exchange programme. If I leave at the end of December, I go to London (where Nikki will be), Italy (where Kate will be), Israel where all sorts of people will be stopping by on Birthright trips, and then finally home for the last day of February. If I stick around in Montreal, I would take the same flight path: London (where I see London friends if they haven’t run off for summer break), Europe (where I might visit my friend Jawina in Holland), Israel in May-June (missing Birthrighters), and back home to start another semester in July. At least this would mean seeing Europe and Israel in summer, but it also means taking a Canadian winter.

I would also have to push through a little bureaucracy and throw money at a few people: the fun of application and approval with McGill; getting a Canadian Study Permit and a Certificat d’acceptation du Québec (CAQ) which I didn’t need for under 6 months in town; extending my travel insurance; getting more money in my Royal Bank of Canada account; rescheduling flights (but that shouldn’t be difficult). And then there’s the issue of whether I’ll stay at Hillel (which many people seem to be leaving), and if not, where would I go?

There are probably a lot of things I would have done differently if I knew I would stay here for a whole year. I would have done a language course (French or Arabic, but I’ve covered very little bits of both informally), and maybe committed to things I haven’t… But these are things I can’t change and now I just need to make a tough decision about my future months.

… Any ideas?