Nach Fruhstuck, wir werden bekommen Spaghettieis

Get Duolingo, they said. It'll be fun, they said.

I kid, I kid. Duolingo is an absolutely awesome resource and I'm here to tell you why.

So I'm probably about an 11.5 on the Richter scale of fucking lazy, especially when it comes to anything academic, commitment-related, or even just some menial activity that doesn't allow for me to move at my own grandfatherly pace. I'm that little shit in your high school math class who sat in the corner all year and did absolutely nothing and was then really happy with scraping a 53% pass and a SEE ME red-pen footnote.

But I've always wanted to be one of those incredibly sexy and worldly people who can slip from one language to another without trying particularly hard. You know them: they'll chatter away in basic Canadiana until they get a mysterious phone call that they answer in flowing, flawless Russian. It makes me wheezy to think of it.

German is a language that has oft fascinated me. The crags and peaks of it, those cute little Umlauts, the power that oozes from it as it's rattled off quickly, fearlessly. Fearless is, in fact, the best word for it: It's a language that demands to be listened to. It's a language that gets shit done.

I wanted to take German class at high school, but I wasn't allowed to. I don't know why. I just wasn't. I got stuck with French, which I was annoyingly good at. To this day, I still remember all of my French, but rather insidiously. It lurks below the surface. If you said to me now, "Speak me some French" I'd say hell no. But when I'm in France, and a French person asks me a complex question, I can fire off an answer like a fucking local. It's a useful, albeit perplexing skill, but I want more. I need more.

I was on Tumblr one day and a post about Duolingo came across my dashboard. I discovered that it's free, and there's an app. There's an APP. You can actually take a crash course in a language of your choice using your phone. So I signed up, and holy shit. I can formulate competent sentences. I can conjugate. I can literally watch German dubs of TV shows and catch the gist of what's going on. Not too shabby, for having had the app for all of two and a half months.

For a great (free) kick-start course in any language, get Duolingo. You can't rely on it entirely; you will need to acquire a dictionary of your chosen language and study conjugations, but you can probably hit conversational standards with this app to guide you. They're constantly expanding, too. When I first signed up there was only French, German or Spanish to choose from. Now there's the option of Portuguese and Italian, and I think there's Dutch, too.

And that little green owl cheers you on when you do well. And sends you texts when you need to get on track. It's a better language teacher than any of the humans I came into contact with in school.

Go for it. Talk to your iPhone in a public place. Learn how to explain that your wife is reading a book. It might come in handy someday.

HYOH.

A little bit about me.

This is a really long boring post about my life, so if, like me, you have an attention span the size of a sesame seed, keep scrolling. I won't hold it against you.

So the deal is that I was the youngest of four children; a brother and three sisters. I was born in 1994, in Paisley, Scotland. So if you wanted to know, I'm all about that 90's kid life. I remember dial-up and I remember the millennium. I remember the euro switch-over, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Of course I remember the theme song. Everyone does.

I lived an overly-sheltered, unhappy and weird childhood which I won't get too bogged down in because this blog is supposed to be uplifting (or something along those lines). Come Halloween of 2009, I was fourteen and my parents were embarking on an ugly five-year divorce. My brother had already flown the nest, so my mother, me and my two sisters downsized from the farmhouse we'd spent eight sad years in to a caravan just outside of Cupar, Fife. It was the tiniest space I've ever occupied, but I loved it.

We spent only six months there before we emigrated to Canada, in July of 2010. My oldest sister stayed behind in Scotland; she had, and still has, a boyfriend that she loves dearly and a work life and a social life that she wasn't willing to give up. But myself and my other sister were wide open, and after quitting perfectly good jobs and and checking out of a perfectly good high school (in my case), we took a one-way flight to Ontario, Canada.

In the first few months of being in this country, I experienced the strangest sort of anonymity. This place was my home, but I felt like nobody in it. We didn't have our own place, so stayed with an obscure relative, which was difficult for me to explain, as a sixteen-year-old. And the growing pains were strong in this one: everyone around me spoke a dialect I didn't understand. They practiced etiquette I wasn't familiar with. One of the funniest things was public sneezing. Where I'd come from, if you needed to sneeze, you sneezed. Into your cuff or your hand or into the air. In this foreign country I was now trying to occupy, there was one way to sneeze, and that was into your elbow. And after you'd done it, you had to apologize. And then someone would say, "Bless you." And then you thank them.

I'd travelled before: I did some northern France in 2008 and racked up some hostel experience. But nothing really prepares you for an actual move. You have to relearn everything. You have to reboot yourself. And there are times in which you're going to want to give up on it and leave. Even though I had nowhere to go, and we were so broke that I wore holey, ill-fitting clothes, I packed a bag. I almost walked out, because I was overwhelmed by dysphoria during the months after we moved, in which I felt utterly lost and more alone than I ever had in my life. And I'd always been fairly alone. We never really had connections with any extended family: most of them barely know who I am. But for those months in the beginning, I was incredibly emotionally unstable.I harmed myself and my relationships with others suffered greatly. I lost my social skills and grew deeply anxious. There were times when I felt like I couldn't do it anymore. It being life. I wanted to be done.

But I needed to get on my feet. When my grades hit absolute rock bottom, that was a wake-up call. Even through all the weird experiences I had in my childhood and all the unrest and misery at home, I'd always been a really great student. And the thought of losing that rocked me. I was never a math kid, but I did my sciences well. I was always extremely artistic. I've been drawing since I could hold a pen and writing stories since I could string a sentence together.

When I was seventeen, I got the chance to go on a trip across three countries: Italy, France, and back up to the UK. It scared me, but I'd always itched to travel. So somehow a couple of grand was scratched together from a relative who suddenly burst back into our lives, wanting a relationship that I was not equipped to give, and I went on my way. I wasn't sure how to react to being helped out by family, since we'd pretty much been an island. But this was an opportunity I wasn't going to pass up.

And so I lived the highs and lows of hostel life, on-foot all-day travel, rickety buses, cold showers, bad food and all those gross, hilarious travel moments that never quite leave you, like having a screaming meltdown in the Louvre and getting rained on it a white t-shirt in Rome. I discovered something that I didn't even know I was looking for: Me. I realized that maybe I'm not the kind of person who goes to school, gets a job, buys a house and settles down. Maybe I'm the kind of person who puts some stuff in a bag and goes off to see as many different skies as possible.

When I returned, back to the life I didn't feel was mine, something had changed in me. My grades spiked back up and I started to write again. I'd always loved to write, and always wanted to be an author, but my zest for storytelling had taken a nosedive during my malaise. When I came back, soared back up. I graduated in the summer of 2012 with honours, and an award for outstanding achievements in art. When I graduated, I had formed relationships with a group of people that went beyond friendship - they are my family. I know they will be with me, near or far, for the rest of my life.

From the end of 2012, through to the start of 2015, I worked like stink for no pay, but freedom was catching. I scrubbed floors and washed dishes and stacked books, and I met some shitty coworkers and some truly great ones; I made friends, I inked my skin, I pierced my face. The gesture lines I'd drawn of myself so many years ago were beginning to sharpen.

In 2015, I left Canada.

Canada gave me so much. It gave me my life back. And I thought this was why I was living there, until I realized that it wasn't Canada that had given me these things, but the people I met there. For the people, I would have stayed; for what I wanted for myself, I had to go.

There were tears and fights and tribunals, but in the end, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to move back to the UK. I wanted to be in Europe, where I felt my body belonged. So I sent my belongings off on a voyage across the sea, strapped up a suitcase, and took a one-way flight back across the water.

And here I am.

Will I stay? I don't know. Maybe not. But for now, I'm fine. At this point, and at this age - months shy of 21 - I think I'm ready to become the person I realized I was when I took my first taste of being on the road. I think I'm ready to be "that woman" and not "that girl". I think I'm ready for the rest of my life.