Trick-or-treat!

DUNZO with classes for the semester! Crazy. I still have a big assignment and two finals to get through, but it will be nice not to have to actually go to class (though let's be serious, I only had to do that three days a week anyway...). Unlike Vandy, which receives one study day and then one week of finals, UQ gets a whole study week (called swot-vac...I think it stands for something like "study without teaching," and vac is for vacation?), follwed by two weeks of finals. Much more time to study, but they do grade harder so it probably evens out.

Last night IFSA-Butler, the program through which I'm studying abroad, took us to a farewell dinner at Jaz Wine Bar & Restaurant in Toowong. It was fun but also a little sad to look back on the semester and watch a slide show of pictures from our time here...which were all basically of the group I've been travelling with because no one else sent photos, oops! The food was delicious - duck spring rolls, chicken and potatoes, and lemon lime pie! Some people got steak, which was brought out raw but in the process of cooking on a hot stone on the plate - so cool! Being on the meal plan at college is so bad, becaue now whenever I get to eat really good food, especially for free, I definitely indulge way too much! I think a lot of us left the restaurant a little too full last night!

Today was a stressful day as I scrambled to finish and turn in a big assignment between five hours of class, we'll see how that goes. Gotta regain those good (or at least decent!) study habits once I'm back in Vandyland! Tonight, though, was our last formal dinner at college, also known as Shirts Night. The idea is that different tables are meant to dress up and the best costumes win a prize, except there were only two or three tables that participated. My table did a Halloween theme, which was SO great - fall (or autumn as they say here) is my favorite season, and I've been kind of sad that I'm missing out on the leaves and apple picking and pumpkins and cider and crisp mornings and chilly nights and football and Halloween, but tonight provided a great fix! We all dressed up in our spookiest ensembles and ended up winning a bottle of champagne! It was such a great evening, and it took the edge off some of the stress I've been feeling. Thanks, guys!


For those of you who have asked what our "Harry Potter" dinners look like...

For the most part Aussies don't really do Halloween, so it was cool to dress up with them and pretend!

So currently it is 11:39pm, and my alarm will go off in exactly five hours and one minute to get me out of bed and onto a plane bound for Alice Springs. I'll be travelling with two other Americans I've met here, basically to the middle of the country in the outback of the Northern Territory (this is where we were initially planning to go on our mid-sem roadtrip; trust me, we never woulda made it!). Saturday through Monday we'll be on a camping/hiking tour of some of the famous rock formations out in the desert, from the Aboriginal sacred site of Uluru (also known as Ayer's Rock) to King's Canyon to Kata Tjuta, and heaps of places in between. It sounds pretty amazing, as it should be considering the $500 plane tickets we had to buy to fly out into the middle of nowhere!

One last thing I want to share with you. I stumbled across this beautiful song yesterday, take a few minutes to listen to it. It really is one of the most gorgeous songs I've ever heard; it's called "Never Alone" by Jim Brickman featuring Lady Antebellum.

"May the angels protect you, trouble neglect you, and Heaven accept you when it's time to go home...May your tears come from laughing, you find friends worth having, with every year passing they mean more than gold." Amen!