End of study

I handed in my thesis on friday, and in doing so finished up my year at Leicester. I arrived in Leicester just as a rather large thunderstorm hit, and so got very wet walking up to the uni. I then had a few problems printing out the thesis, with the uni printers for some reason messing up about every 5th page. However with the help of the IT guys in the library and trying a different printer we managed to sort it out. But the stress levels were pretty high by that time. However the thesis was handed in with a couple of hours to spare and I then had a very nice lunch with some of my friends from the course.

I spent friday night with a friend in London. It was a fairly quiet evening, some friends here had expressed disbelief at my statement that i was going to get trashed to celebrate finishing the course. Not sure why they didn't believe me, possibly because the best K and I could do was a quiet dinner, followed by a huge bowl of icecream and then doing a jigsaw puzzle until 11pm when we went to bed. Such a crazy night - not what i'm sure many would do on finishing uni.

We did have a reason for such a quiet night. We were up at 5am the next morning to wander down to K's local pub to watch the AFL grand finals live. It was lots of fun. The pub was one of the few in london that weren't charging £10 for a ticket, and wasn't that busy. They had three big screens and several smaller screens, we got a seat in front of one of the big screens and watched most of the finals. I say most of the finals because there was a rather large thunderstorm at about 6am which knocked out the digital signal for around 15 minutes, so we missed the end of the 1st quarter and quite a bit of the 2nd. However we saw all of the final quarter, and what a game that was. I had been feeling like the swannies just weren't on form and K was very happy that the weagles were doing so well, but that final 20 minutes had us all jubilant and anxious in turns. The crowd in the pub was pretty evenly divided between swannies and west coast fans, so there was a good amouunt of cheering at every goal, but the tension in the dying minutes - fantastic stuff. Such a good grand finals. Pity the swannies didn't go back to back but they never really looked on form in the match.

The game also brought home to me how much more comfortable i am in a pub with aussies rather than brits. While both countries have a strong pub culture it is quite different. Even though this pub had been open all night ready for the grand finals there wasn't really anyone that seemed really drunk, and the whole atmosphere was pretty relaxed and friendly. When the signal went down we all had a bit of a groan and then a laugh and just chatted and waited for it to come back up. I watched a few england matches during the world cup in pubs and it was a different feel, one that i was less relaxed in. I can't really explain it better than that, but i'm glad i got to see the grand finals and saw it with a whole bunch of aussies.

I'm heading to spain on tuesday, going to watch some of the women's hockey world cup and then explore some of the south. I'll be away for jsut over two weeks and won't touch this blog while i'm away, but i promise i'll have lots of photos and stories when i get back.

Finally, i forgot to post last week to celebrate my one year anniversary of living in the UK. Only a couple more months and i will be home.