My name is Brook Townsend, I was born on May 2nd 1989 making me 21 years old. I live in Porters Lake Nova Scotia, Canada with my parents :S and I am currently working at the Lake Echo CAP as an Intern.I graduated from Eastern Shore District High School in 2007 and began a B.Sc at Dalhousie University the following fall. I chose Science because I was not sure what I wanted to do but felt like I would be falling behind if I took a year off. I took the chance and unfortunately I was wrong, so I then decided to take the year off and hopefully afterwards I would have an idea of what I wanted to do.
Halfway through the summer of 2008 I decided I wanted to travel after talking to a coworker about his 8 months teaching English in China. I ended up deciding to spend 6 months in Vietnam, I also wanted to go somewhere hot so naturally I chose Ho Chi Minh City (former Saigon).
After returning from the eye opening trip I applied for the Bachelor of Informatics program back at Dal. I was accepted and began in the fall of 2009. This time around I knew almost immediately that INFX was right for me.
BikingAs most kids, I loved riding my bike. I have many fond memories riding aroun kejimkujik National Park on my Toys-R-Us bikes when I was younger. I never became focused on mountain biking until I aged out of minor hockey a few years ago. I needed to fill the gap with another sport and naturally I went with Biking. This was when I built my first bike, I bought most of the parts used from a website with a large buy/sell section geared towards bikes. After I had all my parts I assembled the bike myself; I learned a lot during this time since i wasn't 100% sure how everything went to gether at first. 
The folowing fall I went to Wentworth ski hill to try Down Hill riding for the first time, after that one weekend I was hooked. Hockey never came close to touching the adrenaline rush that I had everytime I went through those trails. I decided that I was going to get more serious and start competeing at race events
The next spring I invested in a new frame that was much more suited for Down-Hill racing, along with several new parts (replacments for the things I broke during my first year) I was ready to race for the first time in my life! The results of my first race were not so good, I crashed on both timed runs I did and ended up in the bottom half out of 20 or so people. This was the same story for two other races I had that year, but I wasn't giving up!
This year I did some major upgrades to my bike (this is not a cheap sport... I had to choose between my bike or a car and i went with the bike hahaha) aming to give me an edge in the races. I only raced once this year but I came in the top ten so I was pretty happy with that, although this was not the highlight of my 2009 season.
Late in the summer me and a few of my good friends took our bikes up to Sugarloaf, Newbruniswick; it is the closest Downhill bike park and it was the best two days of biking I have ever had.
Downhill mountain biking has taken me to quite a few places in Nova Scotia and Newbrunswick
- Wentworth, NS
- Keppoch (Antigonish), NS
- Sugarloaf, NB
- Crabbe, NB
I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on January 3rd after leaving Halifax on the 1st. Halifax, Toronto, Hong Kong, HCMC, was the order of my flight which totaled a grueling 33 hours in Airports and on planes. After the 14 hour flight from Toronto to HK it hit me that everything was real. Sure, I knew where I was going but it didn't seem as real as it did when I stepped into Asia.
I was lucky enough to have a cousin vacationing in HCMC during that time so he got me setup with a place to live and showed me the basic ropes of living in HCMC. My plan was to Teach English so I went for a few interviews at various English schools; I was only able to teach a few classes before everything shut down for Tet, (lunar New Year, Chinese New Year, etc). The actually date of Tet was the 26th of January but schools shut down two weeks before and are out until a week after. This gave me a great chance to check things out while my cousin was still around.
We went to Vũng Tàu (pronounced: Vumn Taow) , 
a beach town about 1h30min boat ride down the Saigon river which makes it a very popular weekend getaway from the city. It's located on a peninsula at the delta; the population is around 1,000,000 people. The beach stretches the entire length of the east side of the city and the water is much warmer than that of the Caribbean. The bars are another highlight of Vung Tau.
After my cousin left I came down with a slight case of culture shock, I was scared to go out of my room, I didn't know the language and I had no idea about how anything worked. For about a week I didn't do much other than watch T.V. in my room and eat Oreos. After I got over it, I made good friends with the manager of the Hotel I was staying at, and started to teach much more. My next big step was learning how to ride a motorbike in HCMC. If you're familiar with motorbikes or dirtbikes you know that there's not much to driving them but in HCMC when there’s 12,000,000 on little scooters mixed in with big trucks things can get a little dicey. It helps that most bikes down there are in the 100-125cc range... don't laugh, these thing as sweet down in Asia! I ended up renting an awesome Yamaha Nouvo which I added ground FX to :D.
Having the bike and knowing how to drive it was key to enjoying my stay. It allowed me to join in on "going around" (instead of drinking, people my age drive around the city in large groups) It also allowed me to go on dates with some of my students (HEY! they asked me okay. and they're my age or older!!! and it's socially acceptable there!).
This is only a small part of my huge adventure! I wish I had the time to write down all my thoughts but it would take forever. One thing you should know is that I’m going back after school for an extended stay, so in other words, it was awesome.. and beer was $0.15 so.. yeah haha.
Okay, it feels like I've written a book! and sorry for the life story ll, I just got into it.Ciao,
Brook
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