It was halfway through reading week, and I was driving to Trinidad, Cuba in a 1958 Chevrolet with two Italians, a driver from Havana, and my mother, when I realized I wasn’t actually going to get any reading done. My mother and the driver were in a heated conversation about Raul Castro, and I was half-listening, my mind drifting. The seats were leather and sticky in the heat; the windows were down; the Caribbean was sparkling and calm …. no, I was definitely not going to distract myself with the psychopathology textbook hitting my feet at every bump in the road.

But on the plane ride back, I realized this was not such a bad thing: education is about so much more than your reading list. Without ever cracking open a book, I studied communism and what a U.S. embargo can do to suffocate an economy. I learned the hard way not to eat street food or seafood at suspicious restaurants. I jumped into the sea around a coral reef to swim among fish and mentally collect qualitative data about the ecosystem. Cuba is easy to fall in love with—one of those islands someone might intend to visit for a month and end up staying years. It’s what Ernest Hemingway did.

Three days in Havana was a crash course in Cuban culture and history. It’s become my newest passion, whose history I want to recount to everyone. Havana is full of music and propaganda and mojitos and historical plaques that inform the tourist that the “New World” started in Cuba, where Columbus landed. After the Spanish had killed the majority of the native population, they imported slaves from Africa. The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt called Cuba the land of “sugarcane and slaves.” It’s changed a lot since then, and that’s where its charm begins: as a melting pot of skin colours, cultures, beats, and a fight for independence—first from Spanish rule, and then from American imperialism—that has won Cubans their country, but deprived their economy. Perhaps I was so captured by Cuba that I learned all this at the expense of memorizing disorders from the DSM, but I don’t feel like a bad student.

The reason I came to McGill was because I wanted to learn more. Graduating at the end of April, with the threat of a diploma looming in the distance, I recently decided to stay in an academic environment because, simply put, the last two years have not been enough, and I—wait for it—actually want to keep learning. But reading week reminded me of the other educations we can’t receive on campus in lecture halls. As the midterm season continues, a season which seems to begin in the second or third week of January, only ending the week before finals, I am usually seized by the suspicion that everyone lives in the library, dutifully reviewing notes and memorizing formulas, when I’d rather just munch on cookies, watch sitcoms on my computer screen, and not do any work. When I can replace the cookies-and-sitcom procrastination technique with a trip out of this comfort zone, I learn more in two days than I do in two weeks.

So as I trudge through the snow towards the sixties ugliness of McLennan and resign myself to hours in the library with the rest of the overworked McGill population, I remember that a reading week is not necessarily time off: our education never takes time off. In one way or another, we’ll be learning for the rest of our lives. And I kind of like that.