Dreaming Canada

Guys, have you ever dreamed something extremely hard to come true? I am dreaming something like that right now ! I live in Rome (Italy) and next year my school allows me to study abroad, i love to get to know new cultures, dip into new realities different from the one i got used to, plus i've always wanted to study somewhere subjects are taught in English (i'm seriously in love with this language !), so i can't miss an opportunity like that !
Why Canada (as you can guess from the title)? Well, actually at the beggining i didn't know wheter to pick Canada, Australia or UK. They told me not to pick UK simply because is a culture too close to ours (watching from an "Italian point of view" in fact, Uk is right there !!). Why not Australia? Australia seems to be amazing, i didn't pick it not because it is not a nice place or schools are not good, but because Canada fits better my priorities and tastes. First of all, I love cold !! I know, it's pretty strange considering I'm half brazilian, but I just love cold ! I've always dreamed to live in a cold place, maybe somewhere with snow, especially during Christmas, like the song says i've always been "dreaming of a white christmas". Canada is the great north, which place can better fit my taste?! Plus I also love the culture behind the "cold", in Canada you can easly practice winter sports (which are also very popular there) like skiing, and the ones you can play on ice like Ice-hockey or skating. Talking about that, i'd really like to try out ice-hockey, i really wanna know how it works ! Then another reason that made me choose Canada over Australia is its bilingual aspect, in Canada they speak English and French, both languages I study at school, both languages I love (i love French, and English is my favourite language), and by studying in Canada I can improve both !! I can make some subjects in English and some in French (French immersion) and of course I will also have English and French classes. Going to Canada is a great opportunity to get to know a different educational system, see how it works and why not, even make some comparisons with the italian one ! I've been checking some schools they told me to look for (once I told them about my interests and priorities) and I'm still positively shocked, canadian schools offer so many interesting subjects to learn !! And even the ones we study here in Italy, they study them better (talking about the scientific ones considering they are the ones i like, can't say the same about the humanistic ones) ! For example I can study drama, photography and psychology, subjects i can't even imagine to study here in Italy !
Plus on my free time, maybe during some kind of holiday I'd like to visit other cities of Canada (if I go, i'm staying in Okanagan) like Vancouver, Ontario, Quebec city and even adventure into the cold north territories such as Nunavut, Yukon and Northwest territory's cities. Why do i want to get to know so well Canada? First because I'm going to live there for a school year, that's becoming my home for a year, I want to know my home the better I can ;) Second because it's the country of one of my best english teacher, probably THE ONE who taught me to speak English, if it weren't for him, i probably wouldn't be here writing this ! I want to get to know his country.
But I may just be dreaming, studying an year in Canada is very expensive and I don't know if my parents can afford it, i really hope they can ! This dream may be extremely hard to come true for a simple reason: It's not up to me ! It's all up to my parents' economies ! I can't do nothing to make it happen, I just can hope for the best ... and that's exactly what I'm doing. So to my Canadian readers: Hope to see you soon :)

Freedom: What is it?

Hello guys, I'm Chris,
today i'd like to talk about Freedom. We consider freedom a gift that our ancestors fought to give us, but what is freedom? You can ask it to four people and get four different answers ... the truth is we don't know. What i'm writing down below is not a definition of freedom (as i've sayed, that's not easy to find) but just my personal idea of what it is. If you have a different idea, please post it as a comment, i'd be very happy to read it. Freedom for me is a state of mind, a person is free only when it has an open mind, a mentality with no limits, free from any stereotype, prejudice, or dogma. After telling this someone asked me: "What if i'm angry with you, can i snap you?"  Of course not, but that makes me think that maybe i should explain myself in a different way: A free person is someone who has a MENTALITY with no limits, there's a difference between mind and the "physic world", you're free to be angry with me, what you're not free about is to express it in the "physic world" by snapping me because that would somehow damage a person. So in other words: you are free to think whatever you want and have your personal ideas, you can also take them to the "physic world" by acting the way your ideas tell you to do but AS LONG AS IT DOESN'T HURT anyone (yourself included, that's why i don't consider a free person someone who kills himself). We always think we're free, but are we really free? I mean when you go buy the last version of Ipod or computer you may think you're free because you're actually buying something with your money, but if you pay attention you've probably heard its spot on tv thousand times saying "buy me" before actually thinking of doing it !
If you buy something because someone or (in this case) something told you, you're just doing what someone else want and not what you do want ! But from the other side you could really need a new mobile phone, maybe your last one has just broken ! So i think this way:
Whenever something makes you want to do an action, you should stop and think "is it really what I wanna do?" If the answer is yes, go on ! If the answer is no, you've just seen how human mind can be conditioned ! You were close to do something you didn't want just because someone else asked you !
Thinking about the world you might have noticed that even if we're free, we do have some rules to follow !
Some of them are physics, you may want to fly but gravity won't never let you do it by moving your arms !
Some of them instead are written by men, and that don't make them less important, if a nation forbides you to kill a human being maybe is just a way of protecting its citizens (yourself included !). The real mistake is thinking that there's no freedom because we have rules. Heraclitus says that nothing can exist without its opposite, it may sound weird but think about it:
As a free man i can say: "Tomorrow i'm going to Spain" but if a pilot from Iberia didn't make a contract that "forces" him to work tomorrow, i may not go to Spain, but from the other side the pilot decided to make a contract with Iberia, he could make a contract with Tap, British airways, Tam or even don't make any contract ! But from the other hand this freedom is also linked to a limitation; he wants to work because he probably need to get some money to live !
He's forced to be free to choose to force him, in other words freedom and limitation needs each other !! You can't have one of them without the other.
I hope i didn't confuse you, Chris