I finished my tests last Friday, and it was a beautiful thing. The exam period here is 2 weeks long, but my four tests were four days in a row all in the first week. It was a pretty busy week studying for all of them, and I'm really happy to have them be over. I have just been working and going out with friends now, we had a good night out at the Embassy (club in the city) and the Down Under Bar last night, it was good to be out with most everyone except the very unlucky few that have exams still on Friday and Saturday (Saturday is a test day too... how sad). Most of the other exchange students are leaving this week, and it's pretty sad. It's just going to be weird without them here, I've definitely gotten used to them being around and shared a ton of cool experiences with them, and it's a sad time to see them go home back to the US and Canada and Italy or wherever else they would be from. A few are sticking around for their degree or for another semester though, and I'm pretty happy about that. New ones will be coming in a month, and there are apparently more Europeans coming for semester 2.
Some cool things have been going on in the last few weeks, before exams started I went to a Socceroos game (the Australian national soccer team) vs. Iraq, and it was a lot of fun. We all painted our faces and had a good group of people out. We took the bus over, the Suncorp Stadium is only
about 10K away from UQ which was easy. I also went to a concert at the uni bar called the Red Room a couple weeks ago, it was an Aussie hip hop group called TZU (say it: T - Zed - U). They were sweet, they had really funky beats and live musicians (guitar, bass, drums, keys, and a DJ) plus 2 guys rapping (asian and a white guy). It was upbeat and fun to dance too, and my college got discounted tickets which is always good. The ICC (inter-college) sailing regatta also happened some weeks ago, which was a crazy experience. All the colleges compete against each other in the morning for rowing on the Brisbane 
River, and then people just party all day at the river, then moving to Leo's college (in this room called the Snake Pit) where it got really messy. It was a really hot day out, and people were all sweaty, and then different colleges started throwing and spitting beer on each other, and the entire room was covered in beer, and everyone was soaked. It sounds disgusting, but it was a lot of fun being there, and on the walk back home to Union, one guy Lacky felt the need to be naked and walked across the whole rugby oval and down the street into college without any clothes on. It was a ridiculous day to say the least. We also had the Union Mini-Ball, which was like Halloween. You can dress up however you want, and they organized buses to take us out 
to the Fox Hotel to their bar up on the roof. It was fun, people definitely went all out with their costumes. I went as Guiness, and the other girls in my group were Smirnoff, Captain Morgan, and Absinthe. Some of my other favorite costumes were a zebra (say it: zeh-bra), Tyrone Biggums from Chapelle's Show, the Spartans from 300, and my friend Carly that dressed as a jungle woman, but people w
ere asking if she was going as a rape victim. Some girls also went as the Union College superheroes, and had pretty sweet costumes.I'm also looking forward to winter break here, I have 5 weeks off in total. I am going to work for the first 2, then fly up to Adelaide to meet Shannon (my frosh year roommate), who is awesomely coming out to travel around Aus
tralia. We are going to go to Kangaroo Island there for a few days, where there are penguins and seals and sandboarding and other cool stuff I've been told about. We are then traveling to Melbourne and going to national parks along the way as well as the Great Ocean Road. We get to stay in Melbourne for a few days, and then I fly back to Queensland into the Sunshine Coast airport, where I get to hang out with friends up there for a couple days, then go back to Brisbane to work for another few days. I reckon it'll be heaps of fun.Photos are: Socceroos game crew, miniball photos (me + jungle rape victim, capn morgan, and cat, the Beatles, Tyrone, zebra), and photos from the rowing regatta (check out the wet people and the guy's nose dripping some brown liquid, it was real nasty), and spot naked Lacky walking on the field.
