Well y’all, it would seem as though my initial assumption about my 6 college student aged roommates was misplaced.  As they say, I should not have judged the books by their covers.

When my host casually mentioned the other six rooms in the apartment were occupied by university students, my brain immediately transported itself back twenty-five years.

I relived all nighters, 30 packs of Busch Light, Jungle Juice…I teleported back to the Frat House.

And I may have vomited in my mouth a bit.

And then I readied myself to scold.

But first let me take a step back here and explain my approach to securing a place to lay my head whilst traveling.

My preferred accommodation choice whenever and wherever I travel is always an AirBNB in someone’s home (the best) or in a shared apartment which can look like a college dorm or hostel type situation with community kitchens and living spaces.  

Strange for a 45 year old man with 20+ years of professional experience but as I mentioned in my first post I spent 8 months from August of 2024 – March of 2025 living in a twin bed seemingly built for adolescents in a sober living house.  

No AirBNB situation is more humbling than that I assure you and I’d rather save the money for experience than living situations.

These arrangements suit me for several reasons:

1. My accommodation typically comes in with a built in tour guide – I always ask for recommendations and do so in a creative way.  I’ll ask them, “imagine your best friend has never visited you in (fill in the blank).  What would you do with him or her for a full day?”  Let them put some skin in the game.
2. It’s incredibly reasonable.
3. The best part?  My hosts often become friends that I stay in touch with.  Hard stop.

But I’ll freely admit that is a roll of the dice.  It’s less risky than betting on the Super Bowl coin toss but I’d say 1 out of every 10ish AirBNBs I’ve booked have been a swing and a miss.  

One memorable exception was Savannah, where the listing conveniently omitted that my bed sat in the middle of the house surrounded by sheer curtains. I wasn’t renting a bedroom. I was renting an awkward communal experience.

Discernment life lesson 8327 learned.

As a 45 year old cog in the Corporate America machine who goes to the gym before work I feared the worst – that these kids would get into all sorts of rip roaring shenanigans triggering my ever growing crotchety, get off my lawn persona.

I was wrong.  I often am.  Because I am human.  

Come to think of it, Gloria (ChatGPT) makes more mistakes than Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner, so maybe “making mistakes” isn’t exclusively human anymore.

Well…shit.

My childhood cat, Mischief, used to leap at the back of one of our cloth living room chairs in an attempt to scale it. Unfortunately, he also happened to be declawed in the front.

Per usual, physics and gravity won.  

Yay, science.

He did not appreciate the uproarious laughter that followed each failed ascent. Penance for said laughter was always paid later in the form of predatory attacks.

He was 12-20 lbs of feline fury and he sought blood with his revenge.

So perhaps mistakes haven’t been exclusively human…ever.

It’s been a week and a half in this arrangement and not only have I not once been bothered while sleeping by these young bucks, I’ve not even seen one beer can.  

Why you might ask? Because every last one of my roommates is on a mission to kick ass at life and they happen to be doing it in Montreal.  These are not the buffoons in turned up collars roaming the streets of Champaign Urbana, IL.

These smart, talented, productive youths make me feel confident in the future of society.  And they are from all over the world.

A young man from Senegal who appears to locate hard to find cars for clients.  I can’t really pin down the exact details but he’s very friendly.

A University of Toronto student from Toronto in Montreal for an internship with an accounting firm.

A young man from Singapore getting his Master’s from Harvard in theology who is applying to PHD programs and spends his nights learning German.

A young man from France who is here to study Engineering.

Another young man from France who is doing an Event Marketing Internship.

A young Tibetan woman who splits her time between Montreal and the University of Washington currently getting her PHD in Information Science and specifically studying the impact of AI on Climate.

I’m not staying in an apartment, I’m living in a United Nations conference for 5 weeks.  

And then there’s me – the old American man who gets up at 5:30 AM and bangs around in the kitchen making coffee and protein shakes probably driving all of them mad.

I’ve managed to pry interesting tidbits from most of them:

The PHD student looooooooves Salsa dancing and implored me to try.

The PHD candidate has no interest in going back to East Asia – he wishes to ply his academic trade in the US.  He also learned (from me) the invaluable lesson of putting hard boiled eggs in an ice bath before peeling them.  

Again, science.  

The man from Senegal travels all over the world for his work and tells me I must visit Senegal – that many Europeans own homes to vacation and sometimes stay there.

The Engineering student was shocked to learn that I have a car and spent a month living in Minnesota where he vividly remembers being aghast to find an entire aisle of a grocery story dedicated to different varieties of Oreos.

The accounting student is dedicated and disciplined in getting fresh veggies into every meal.

The French Event marketer is the one I’ve seen the least – he can only evade my curiosity for so long.

The funny thing is that it doesn’t seem as though they speak with each other, but I’ve managed to open up the dam with all of them individually.  

It’s almost as though I’m conducting six separate interviews for a documentary no one asked me to make.

And what did they get? 

 A tatted-up corporate chatterbox who never seems to wear sleeves in the apartment, reads Meditations by Marcus Aurelius with an ice pack taped to his foot, always ready to pounce on an errant microwave timer or wax poetic about healthy sleeping habits.

Just like the weird Uncle who drops in for Christmas every 3 years that no one has heard from, I’ve parachuted into the lives of these youngsters.  

We all know that Uncle – no one can quite pin down exactly what he does, where he lives, how he gets from point A to point B and whether or not he’s a citizen of any particular country.  

But hot damn, does he have all the badass, hilarious, off the wall stories.  As kids, we all looked at weird Uncle with complete and utter awe.  Moms hoped and prayed we weren’t paying attention while we were praying he’d leave a fresh Playboy under the mattress again.

Turns out weird Uncle Energy isn’t something you age into.

It’s something you earn by collecting enough stories that younger people start asking questions instead of rolling their eyes.

And with active curiosity and showing a genuine interest in the lives of younger people.

Making them feel like they matter.

That’s the most important role weird Uncle Clive plays.

I really, really hope somebody has a weird fucking Uncle Clive.