It is my first day at Tamwood International school. I follow the other students into a living room with big windows and a world map on the wall. I am a little nervous and take a seat on a couch next to an Asian boy. “Where are you from?”, he asks me with a friendly smile on his face. When I tell him that I come from Switzerland he begins to list all the Swiss-German swearwords he knows and he knows quite a few of them. This is when I first realize that I haven’t only come into a language school but much more into a big international family.

I have been here for almost seven weeks now and I can’t believe how time is flying. In September I could enjoy the warm summer weather and explore the outdoors such as six different lakes, three mountains, and a waterfall. I have seen some bears as well, one even came towards me and my friends when we were walking along the valley trail. Now that it is getting colder I enjoy Whistler’s indoor activities such as a trampoline hall which I find so exciting.

I like Whistler for its stunning nature. The mountains that surround us, the forests, the lakes, and also diverse wildlife. The village itself is small and pretty and although it is busy with the many visitors that come here it is a quiet and relaxed place with such a lot of friendly people.

I feel that I have already made huge progress in English since I came to Whistler thanks to my teacher Katrina who has a lot of experience and knows what is most important for us to learn and how we can understand it the best. But from the first day here I discovered that my time in Canada is not just about studying English but also about getting to know wonderful people from all over the world and enjoying the wide range of facilities with them. I am looking forward to spending some more weeks here and I hope they won’t pass too fast. My biggest wish for after these three months will be to see all those wonderful, interesting, funny, lovely, friendly, sympathetic, impressing people again that I have met during my time here.

Many thanks to my Tamwood Whistler family, I will definitely come back, I promise!

Written By: Annabel Calderan