Half full or half empty?

I am officially half way through this year abroad! I have completed one term and a half, and I have one and a half more to go! That is so scary. It is going way too quickly. There is still so much more that I want to do here and now I feel like I am running out of time, like a year isn't long enough. Half full....I can't wait to see my friends and family. Half empty.....leaving is going to suck. I love it here! If only there was a way of combining the two. If I had infinite amounts of money, or won the lottery, I would happily pay for people to come out here! What is the going tuition for international students at UCSC? About $40,000 a year. Hmmm, maybe I will need to win the lottery and marry rich.Speaking of needing to be rich, you have to be to get the everyday items that you would do in England. Look what I found at a deli in San Jose:

Had a lovely day yesterday with one of my friends. It was her birthday on Friday and so yesterday we decided to go on a BBBIIIGGG shopping trip to San Jose, which is the nearest city to Santa Cruz that has decent malls. We shopped till we dropped. Quite literally. When we arrived we went and had a gorgeous lunch at this New York/Italian restaurant where we gorged ourselves on calamari, soup and complimentary fried, cheese stuffed ravioli! Yum. Then when our stomachs were bursting we hit 3 different malls. One was the really uber posh one where every single shop was completely over our price limit; Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Swarowski etc etc. Then the other two were where we stocked up. I am normally a really bad shopper. I bargain hunt and buy things because they are cheap, not necessarily because I like them. But this time I was so desperate for new clothes that I didn't hesitate to flash the credit card (my British one though because that way I can forget about it for now and it looks like a smaller amount of money in pounds!) and pick up jeans, trousers, multiple tops, jackets etc. The only thing I didn't find were boots. Though we did find a transvestite doing a make-up show in the middle of the mall:

Stupidly we decided to go grocery shopping afterwards which meant that trying to lug many many bags up the hill from the car back home was a near impossible task and took forever. And to make things worse the salad left over from the restaurant which I had stuffed inside another bag, leaked all over my new clothes. I was not impressed.

It was another one of my friends birthdays' this week, my roommates boyfriend, and as he grew up in Germany for a number of years, we went to this really cute German tavern place for dinner the other night. It was this little wooden cabin with all German statues and memorabilia plastering the walls. Even the waitresses were dressed in traditional German clothes and the waiters in laderhousen. (Spell check doesn't like this word...it want's to change it to 'slanderous' or 'slaughterhouse', sorry Germany). Again we feasted on traditional food, from weinerschnitzel to goulash to apple strudel. The guys enjoyed the beer and various flavours of schnapps including honey and raspberry!

Well I think that is it for this week. I have a Disney paper to write today, all about the representation of women in Disney films! Any excuse to watch 101 Dalmations aye? Oh I shall leave you with something that cracked me up. The other night the guys who we share a kitchen and bathroom with had a party, which of course involved beer pong. I got up in the morning to find that although they like to party, they are still UCSC students and therefore are concerned for the environment and recycling etc!