It's been quite a while since my last update. Things are coming to a close now as I know have an amazing 10 days left in Adelaide!! A few highlights of my last few weeks include the amazing wine tour of the Barossa Valley where we sampled over 30 wines and saw some of the world's most famous wineries. It was beautiful to see the vines with changing fall leaves. Sadly we didn't get to visit my favorite winery known as Jacob's creek. But it is the biggest winery and they own several thousand acres of land. From what I remember they produce an astounding 25,000 bottles of wine an hour! We visited 3 wineries that day the first was Hemera, the second was Schild, and the last was Kaesler. All very amazing but I ended up buying from Schild estate and amazing frontignac white wine for 15$.

Over the next few weeks I went to the Adelaide Zoo where I had a very fun quokka selfie. A quokka is from Western Australia and they are half wallaby half kangaroo and they are known for being the happiest looking animal on earth. They look like they are smiling and they are just so adorable. I also bought tickets for Monardo Zoo. This is the largest free range zoo in the world where animals from giraffes to rhinos run free on the land rather than locked up in cages.

Last weekend I went on an exciting shopping adventure through a warehouse sale. Everything of some famous Australian high brand fashion lines were 10$. These labels have dresses and clothes from 100$ plus so for everything to be 10$ is a mad house sale. Over 4,000 people said they would attend the event and probably about 100 people slept there in line overnight. Me and my two friends arrived an hour before the opening and we waited in total for 3 hours to get into the store for only 15 minutes of shopping. You couldn't try anything on and you had to dig around and over the other 60 people to find things you wanted. It was overwhelming but overall a good experience. I ended up with 3 super cute dresses that all fit me pretty well in the end. Thank goodness. My friend Kaylee had the dress that just wouldn't work. All 3 of us tried on this dress and it just looked awful on all of us. The retail price… 230$ crazy right!? In the end, that dress is not traveling back home with her haha.

I am coming in the home stretch of finals as I have studied for over a month now for these exams and now only have 1 left in 5 days. My accounting that I was most nervous for was a 3 hour exam and I feel good about this one; it was worth 40% of the grade. My stats one I also felt pretty good about and it was worth 70% of the grade! My last exam is macroeconomics and it is worth 60% of the grade. Overall, before my exams I was making HD's which is really really good here. Hope that my exams will keep those scores up or at least get me credits to transfer back home.

I am now at the point where I feel like I have studied too much and I'm just anxious to get home. It's hard to just study every day from anywhere of 2-6 hours. I'm just exhausted. I kind of wish it was just only a week and then exams would follow the next. But it's been 3 weeks now and I still have another week until my last exam. I think all this down time really makes me miss home even more because I'm thinking about it more as it gets closer and I'm not as distracted from activities and classes.

I am very excited that my best friend Ariana is coming to visit in just 6 days! We have an amazing trip planned for 2.5 weeks! She will be arriving in Adelaide on July 2nd where we will probably go to a conservation park, walk around the city, maybe sample some wines. Then we are off to Sydney for a week and we have a few things planned for our time there. Then we fly to Townsville as our first stop in Queensland the land of the Great Barrier Reef. Then we will take a bus down to Airlie Beach for our 3 day and 2 night sail trip of the Whitsundays and Great Barrier Reef. We will get to snorkel and scuba in different reef locations and visit one of the top ten beaches in the world, Whitehaven Beach. I am as excited for this trip as I have had countless friends' take these sail trips on yachts and absolutely loved it. After the sail trip we will return to Sydney for two days where we will say our goodbyes to Australia.

I have enjoyed every second of my time here in Adelaide and in Australia. I feel that I have discovered so much about myself and gained confidence in myself and who I feel like I am. Everything I hoped to get out of this experience I feel that I have and even more. But I am ready to get back home to Texas and finish my last two years at A&M.