So I thought I was the only UBC student at Cardiff this semester, because at the Study Abroad conference in October I was definitely the only person with “Wales” on my Hello My Name Is tag.
But today I happened to sit down in my Cleopatra class next to a girl with an accent similar to mine, and when we started chatting after the lecture, it came out that she’s a fellow UBC student. (She knows of one other UBC student here, so there’s at least three of us).
Her name is Rachel Layne and she’s an English major and psychology minor. Since she lives downtown and I was headed downtown to run errands after class anyway, we ended up chatting about classes and UBC and Vancouver and Cardiff and literature for the twenty minutes it takes to get from John Percival to the city center. Before we parted ways, we exchanged Facebook information.
When I logged onto Facebook to accept her friend request this evening, I saw that she’s a musician, which never came up as we were talking. On her Facebook, she had a photo of her singing the anthem at a hockey game in Vancouver. Out of curiosity, I Googled her. It turns out she has her own website and some beautiful professionally-recorded songs on SoundCloud. I went and looked her up on iTunes, and yep, there was one of her songs, “What Is Love.”
So I’m now Facebook friends with someone who has original music on iTunes. This is a very cool thing. Also her music is worth looking up.