Summer is just around the corner

Here at uni the weather is warming, the sky freshening its blue coat of paint and the bbqs are coming out. There are almost constant bbqs down by the lake in front of my room, so I often get wafts of bbqy smells. Right now I should be studying for my Latin exam in a few days, but instead I'm going to fill you all in on my summer break plans because, quite frankly, they're shaping up to be pretty good indeed. They'll start on the 27th of May, after my last exam, and continue through to the end of September. The exam period goes until the 10th

of June, and I'll still have youth group (have I told you I've been helping out with one?) and young adults stuff at church until then, so I'll be in Norwich until then, although will hopefully get out and see some of England too, but be back for the weekends.

My first summer break adventure will be going to Italy for 2 weeks. I've found myself a job working for a English language school that goes to schools in a country and runs two week intensive English classes for upper primary students. I'll be running activities, sports and crafts for 4 classes a day, living with a host family, weekends and evenings free to explore, get paid £250 a week ($AU400ish) and have all travel expenses there and back covered. I'm a little nervous about having to run a class of about 16 kids with varying language skills all by myself, but I've talked to people in the company quite a bit, and it sounds like they have a lot of support available and experienced people to give guidance. I don't know exactly where I'll be yet - they run a few camps at the same time, and distribute everyone among them. A friend from church is also going to be working for them at the same time, so we're hoping and praying we might be on the same camp. We could ask, but they have so many people to place they can't really take much notice of requests.

I was hoping the timing would work out so I could use the opportunity to then travel around Italy a bit, but a few of days after that finishes I have to be at Iona, so will need to fly straight back to England and head up to Glasgow. I've written about this a little bit before, but in brief, I'll be working in the shop for seven weeks. This is very exciting, and a lot of people I've talked to about it have been just a little jealous.

After that I'll hopefully head straight to Greenbelt, where I've applied to volunteer in the youth village, and am just waiting to hear back about police check types of things...

And then I have about four weeks left of my break in which I can do whatever I like. Just this week I heard that I've been given at $2000 scholarship by UTAS, so I intend on putting that to good use around Europe for the end of my break. Ideally I would like to explore Eastern Europe - Western is all very lovely and 'must see-ish', but also a little repetitive because it's all the same companies doing the same things in slightly different cities, but I'd like to go somewhere completely different. I will, of course, have to go to Paris at some point so I can fulfil my promise to Granny that I will visit Paris, but if someone told me I could go either to Paris OR (eg - totally random off the top of my head) Hungary, I'd much prefer the latter.

I'd still really quite like to go and see MUSE in September, but can't seem to find anyone who will actually be here then to go with. So far I'm only aware of one other exchange student who will be here for next semester too, another Australian girl, and I'm not sure what her plans are. But those last four weeks are still to be organised - all very dependent on things like people visiting, travel buddies, money etc etc.

And that's the plan. While you think up intelligent questions to ask me about it, check out this flavour of crisps I have just eaten. I couldn't go past the six pack that included this one:

It's all part of World Cup fever, and came with two other flavours.

South African Sweet Chutney: Not bad - quite a bit like the tomato flavoured ones I think are around in Aus.

Australian BBQ Kangaroo: I didn't start hopping, but they were alright. A little like bbq flavour (strangely enough), but not samboys bbq - more like thins bbq (considering thins and walkers are the same brand, that's not really surprising)

Japanese Teriyaki Chicken: Still to be sampled.

I think I'll have to try the other flavours too - they've got a few different varieties - English Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding, German Bratwurst, American Cheeseburger are some I remember seeing.