Hey everybody!

This is it.  Barring something crazy happening, this will be my last blog post from Australia.  I realized before I started writing this that I forgot to blog about what we did over study week, so I'll start with that.  First of all, I actually got Brenna to go out golfing again (in fact, it was kind of her idea).  She had already improved from the first time we went, and it sounds like she may even like it enough to want to go once we get back to the states!  Talk about unexpected.  Also over study week, a group of us spent a day in Perth, during which we made a couple of stops.  The first was at the Western Australia Museum, and it was really cool.  They had all kinds of stuff about the history of W.A., including an exhibit about Aboriginal Australians.  It was cool to go through the museum and actually know a lot of the information that was being presented because of how much we've learned about Australia during our time here.  After the museum, we made a trip to the Perth Mint, where they produce coins for a large portion of Australia.  This was an awesome experience.  We were given a short talk about the history of gold in Australia, and we had the chance to see and hold replicas of the biggest gold nuggets ever found!  The mint also had the world's largest coin, which weighed over 1,000 pounds!  We had the opportunity to watch a gold bar be poured, which was REALLY cool, and we each found out how much we would be worth if we were made of gold (based on our weight).  Turns out I would be worth almost three million dollars!  One last thing we had the chance to do at the mint was hold a gold bar that is worth an estimated 200,000 dollars.  Study week ended up being kind of rainy, so we didn't get to do everything that people had wanted to do, but later in the week we had one day with good weather, so Brenna and I went to the Perth Zoo.  I won't go through all the animals they had there, but as you can imagine, it was the coolest zoo I've ever been to by far.  Brenna has the pictures we took up on her facebook, and I may try to get around to putting them up as well at some point, but I wouldn't hold your breath.  After a fun study week, it was time to get down to business, and boy did I.  I studied more than I ever have for my four finals, because I didn't know what to expect for finals here in Australia.  They're all done now, and I feel like I did really well on all of them, so that makes all the effort worth it.  We are currently trying to waste time until our shuttle to the airport gets here at 6:40, because our residence hall closed at noon, and we didn't want to spend all day until our 11:55 PM flight in the airport.  After we make the four hour journey from Perth to Sydney, we have a seven hour layover at the Sydney airport, and then it's time for the fun to start.  I say this completely sarcastically, as I think our flight from Sydney to LAX is about eighteen hours, and I am definitely going to be anxious the entire time.  On the plus side, we found out that we get to fly on one of those monster airplanes I told everyone about at the start of our trip!  It will look something like this:








I'm really excited for this, but otherwise I'm hoping the flight goes as fast as possible.  It will be an adventure getting from LAX to MSP, because Brenna and I are flying standby, and have no idea which flight we are going to be able to get on.  This will be a new experience for me, but I guess all we can do is cross our fingers and hope we get on one of the first flights.  I'm already going to be missing the start of the Pekarna family vacation, which does not excite me in the least.  Anyway, that's about all from me.  To those of you who have followed this blog throughout my time abroad, thanks for the support!  Blogging has turned out to be kind of fun, and maybe if I do anything noteworthy again in the near future, I'll start up another one so I can keep everybody posted.  Until then, I'm coming home, and so I leave you with a quote:

"The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned." ~Maya Angelou

Good bye for now everybody, I'll see you soon!