I’m sitting at the kitchen table, clutching a big cup of tea, wearing a scarf, looking out the window into the grey, snowy-rainy mess that is December weather. Clearly, this is not Brisbane – this is Switzerland. I’ve been back home for a week now, which seems crazy. Sometimes I still wake up in the morning and expect the ceiling fan running on full power, and the hot Queensland sun to peek through the window blinds. But now that I’m slowly getting used to being home again, it seems like a good time to write my last post as a UQ Exchange student (but don’t worry, this post won’t continue to be as sappy and melancholic as this intro, haha):

The (not very complete) List of Things I Will be Missing Now That I’m Back Home!

• The weather. No further explanation needed…(but yes, mostly this is because my habit of tripping and slipping over random things/my own feet/cracks in the pavement is a lot easier to cope with and contain when there’s not a meter of snow/ice/sleet/mud lying around on the streets).
• The UQ campus. If I didn’t love the St. Lucia campus for its size, cleanliness, perfectly groomed Great Court, its purple-blooming Jacaranda trees, its lack of the uncomfortable, backpain-inducing wooden benches (that I’m used to from my home uni) in lecture theatres (seriously, they’re more like cinema seats. Awesome), its cafes, its park and lakes, it would be for the birds. While they can be aggressive/scary/annoying, it’s just way too hilarious to observe an ibis succeeding to steal, but terribly failing to devour, an entire footlong Subway sandwich (if it’s not your sandwich, that is. Ha!).
• Getting personal training 3 times a week. The struggle to get out of bed at 5am to work out with my host parents was worth it – every single time.
• Spontaneous BBQs in the park or in someone’s backyard.
• Merlo’s skim cappuccino. I will be weeping bitter tears of loss and despair into the sad little cups of vending machine crap that my home uni tries to pass off as coffee.
• Dress-up parties (QUEST, I’m looking at you).
• Weekend trips to various islands/beaches. Yes, this will be replaced with skiing/snow trips at home…but for obvious reasons I’m one to prefer non-slippery, soft, sandy surfaces to icy-snowy-slippery ones, haha.
• My journalism course. This might sound nerdy but seriously…it was awesome, I was genuinely interested in every lecture and it was a very much needed change from my usual business courses.
• But, most of all, I’m going to miss (well actually, I already am) the amazing people that I have met and had the great honour of getting to know (cue sappy background music). My host family, my exchange student friends, the Australians I met at uni and out and about are really what made this semester exceptional and I’m very thankful for that.

My semester at the University of Queensland was an amazing experience and probably the best thing I’ve done at uni. To anyone considering doing a semester abroad: do it! It might seems scary in the beginning, but it is so worth it. And enjoy every second of it…time is going by WAY too quickly – especially in such an amazing place like Brisbane.