About Me

Cape Spear is a wind-swept piece of land jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, not far from St. John’s, and the most easterly point in North America. Anyone who gets to visit the Canadian island province of Newfoundland understands that they’re exploring somewhere cool and unique; anyone from there understands that they’re unbelievably lucky to live in God’s Country. Sometimes though, the only way to understand anything about home is to leave it.  

My name is Ryan Belbin, and I grew up in Pasadena, a small town on the west coast of Newfoundland. A few years into a degree in English Language and Literature at the province’s sole university, Memorial University of Newfoundland (Corner Brook’s Grenfell campus), I moved to St. John’s in 2009, to finish my degree at the main campus there. Having immersed myself in the local music scene and journalistic writing for The Muse, The Independent, and The OvercastI was sure that when I graduated, Tom Power was going to fly in from Toronto and offer me his job at CBC.

That didn’t happen.

So, I turned to travel. It started as an excuse, running away from something that, in hindsight, was really a sense of uncertainty; of not knowing what that something was, because it was by definition a lack of anything. Even though I had my degree, I enrolled in a few more courses at MUN in the fall semester of 2011 – except that the courses were at the university’s tiny satellite campus in Harlow, England, a 45-minute train trip from London. For three months, I had classes on satire with Canadian comedienne Mary Walsh, saw some really fantastic performances on the stages of some impressive West End theatres (and developed the gall to insult some of the terrible ones), and got so accustomed to life in London that I ended up travelling beyond there, to Scotland, Spain, France, and Sweden. Oh, and I saw a Katy Perry concert. 

After a return to reality for 2012, I got accepted into law school at the University of New Brunswick in September of 2013, and spent just about every waking minute before classes started that year exploring the bounds of mountains, rivers, oceans, fields, and myself in New Zealand, a tiny blip on the other side of the map that now houses a sizeable chunk of my soul. More than that, I took the best parts of the experience with me, and even though every day it becomes more of a memory, more of "that thing I did when I was in my early twenties," it's still always a thing that I did.

I'm finished law school now, if that's any indication of where the time has gone. Unreal. But before I did that, I wanted one last sojourn, so off to Europe I went on an exchange semester – to VU University, a campus located on the cusp of Amsterdam, one of the most beautiful cities I've ever had the pleasure of visiting. It also happens to be very close to Schiphol Airport, so it wasn't just canals on the agenda for the autumn of 2015.

For now, my top five list of cities around the world includes Wellington, London, Amsterdam, Dubrovnik . . . and, right there on a chunk of rock in the North Atlantic, a hop skip and jump away from Cape Spear, St. John's. Here's the site of my post-law school articling, the next big thing in this unfolding story. Stay tuned though, because sitting still has proven to be a difficult thing for me.


Cheers,
rb 

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