I only have one week left in Sydney.  It feels like just yesterday I arrived and now here I am, five weeks later, starting to think about what I have to do to finish up the program. It’s a bittersweet feeling because I miss my family and friends back home a lot, but I’m just not ready to leave this amazing place yet.

With the end of the program approaching everyone is cramming in some last minute trips or sightseeing excursions to ensure they get the most out of the trip here.  The effects of how expensive it is to live in Sydney are starting to settle in and with my limited college student budget I was unable to travel again this weekend.  Luckily some of my roommates were in the same boat so we tried to find more things to do in Sydney that we haven’t done yet.  It wasn’t a hard task.  We explored new restaurants and planned a hiking excursion to find the Figure 8 pools in Royal National Park.  We also walked through the Chinese Friendship Garden and shopped at the Rocks Markets, an annual shopping market that pops up during this time of the year. I finally got a good picture with the Opera House as well – I was worried about that because I feel that’s something I couldn’t leave Sydney without and with only a week left I wasn’t sure I would get it.

Due to the fact that the Eels had a bye last week, this week at work felt so much busier.  I was thrown back into the usual routine of having strict deadlines with my daily tasks. This week was even a bit more intense because we had a Thursday night game against one of our biggest rivals (we won – yay!). The reality that the Eels will most likely make Finals is starting to set in as well because with that comes a whole new set of rules regarding Game Day procedures.  It’s exciting to see the office culture start to change with the success of the team and I like that I am able to witness at least the beginning of it.

My Sport Management class is starting to wrap up as I only have two assignments left for the duration of the trip.  The assignments are a bit hard to keep up with actually because my professor has us writing long reports with at least 3,000 words and trying to incorporate that with my work schedule has been a bit of a challenge.  The most recent assignment was a group project so that helped with the work load a bit. Despite the long reports I do think I’m learning a lot from this class and because it’s such a small class my professor is able to coordinate it with our internships which is a nice touch.