Storytelling Project Speech: Traveling To Canada

Storytelling Project Speech
My dad decided to travel to Canada in 1998, when he was 29 years old. He had just completed his PhD in China, and decided to travel to Canada in order to conduct some research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. He had known for a while that he wanted to leave China- not permanently-but just for a little while to gain some experience in a new place. My dad never meant to stay in Canada. His intention was to work in Canada for a few years to obtain some experience, and then travel back to China to become a university professor in Shanghai. At the time, Canada was a global leader in power systems engineering, so my dad believed that he would learn much more working at a Canadian university than he
It is an experience that he has never quite forgotten, even though he has been on hundreds of flights since then. As the plane took off, he stared through the window and watched as Shanghai disappeared from sight. He watched until all he could see was the endless blue ocean below him and the blue sky (a rare sight in Shanghai) above him. The inside of the plane was dark. All the windows were shut in an effort to help people sleep over the constant roaring of the airplane. The fourteen hour flight was not a pleasant one for my dad. Thoughts of the new place he was heading kept him awake all
They wanted my dad to work closer to home, but understood his reasons for why he had decided to stay in Canada. The decision to stay in Canada did not have much of an effect on how often he was able to see his parents. Even when he was in China, my dad worked several hundred kilometres from where his parents lived, and was only able to visit them two or three times a year. In the company he worked at in Winnipeg, he took business trips back to China, where he could visit his parents five or six times a