Saying goodbye to all things Southern...and never feeling so Southern before in all my life!!

I survived 3 months in Mississippi!!

Hey y’all... this may have been the last week I hear the overuse of this phrase on a daily basis and it makes me sad... I’m bringing it home... I think Lisburn needs a little more y’alls and a little less yous!

3 months after we began our adventures at Ole Miss the time came to say goodbye and to move on to the next stage of our journey as we begin our travels home. We are told our lives are like a vapour and I feel like this is true for how fast the time on Study Abroad has gone. I feel like the older I get the more I discover that you never really know how much you love someone until you have to say goodbye. I am going to miss so many good friends that I have built relationships with over the past few months. On Monday we began what seemed like a never ending list of goodbyes and the process of dismantling our room back to it’s prison cell style! Dismantling didn’t really begin however until Thursday night when it hit us that we actually had to start packing up our lives and getting ready to fill a jumbo jet with it all!

We made the most of the sunshine and headed out to the beach beside Lake Sardis for some serious tanning on Monday followed by a trip to look at the boats along the marina. I had my first wakeboarding lesson and being a bit of a self-confessed whimp I did pretty well, almost managing to stand and persevering for half an hour before I eventually gave up because I’d swallowed so much lake water.

One thing that is really cool about being at Ole Miss this semester is that the semester we choose to be there is the semester that the Hollywood movie the ‘Blindside’ is released and shoots Ole Miss into the spotlight...going home I’m looking forward to saying with pride I was a student at Ole Miss and for people knowing where that is and relating it to such a cool movie. We watched it again on Monday night and it was nice to watch it with Southerners who know the family in the movie well.

On Tuesday afternoon we completed our last piece of work for our professors, this was in the form of a comprehensive final for Dr Chessin and was based on all the work from the year. We had to fill in tables to illustrate terminology, there were short answer questions and true/false. We also received our marks from our lessons plans and I was pleased to have achieved 100%.

On Tuesday evening we hosted a thank-you dinner at our friend’s house, making a three course meal to say thanks for all the rides (both boat and car), the coffees, the meals, the nights out and much more. The evening went well and I was pleased to say that no-one got sick from the food!

On Wednesday it was a privilege to have lunch with an older missionary lady called Bette Morgan. We had met her in our first week in Oxford where we had also met girls who became some of our closest friends while we were here. She treated us to lunch out at Oxford University Club which was one of the most posh places I had ever been! She was an inspiring woman to be around and someone whose kind heart I will never forget. After lunch we headed to our friends house and spent the rest of the day watching movies, making dinner and playing cards.

On Thursday we were back to our beloved Bottletree where we met our friend’s grandparents who had come into town for her graduation, I enjoyed sitting beside her grandfather who was a WW2 veteran, he told me of how he had been sent to Australia and island hopped all the way to the Philippines. After doing some shopping on the square we had lunch at Olivia’s Food Emporium, we chilled out and enjoyed the sun while eating our lunch. Due to the hot weather and the lack of the ocean and a pool we decided it would be a great idea to go to Walmart and buy a pool and so the rest of the afternoon was spent in a two ring aquarium themed pool working on the tan. On Thursday night the packing began...

Our last day in Oxford was very busy but really fun...Of course we started our last day with our last ever Bottletree where we ended up getting kicked out of because we were there for so long! We met some more people along the square and after some emotional goodbyes headed to our very own pool complex where we added lemon juice to our hair and lay out some more! After a kabookies lunch and some more tanning it was time to get ready for my first ever baseball game. I wasn’t really sure what to anticipate as we put our Ole Miss tattoos on our faces and got ready for the match but I knew it was going to be a fun night. One thing I learnt about baseball is that it is all about numbers!!! I loved the game and was disappointed we had to leave early. I got a great sense of pride in my college watching them play in the huge stadium and regret not seeing more sports while here at Ole Miss.

We left the match and headed to the square to pick up our free tickets and meet and greet passes for the Justin Moore concert in the Lyric...I used to say I like country...well I think I never experienced REAL country. I have never seen so many ‘rootin tootin’ cowboys with their spurs and their hats in all my life and every one of them knew every word! It was a fun way to end a three month period in the South especially as we got to meet him... I had no idea who the guy was and unlike everyone else waiting in line was calm as a cucumber and got about 5 minutes of chat out of him which probably would have been more fulfilling if he had talked a bit faster...his opening line was ‘Hello Darlin’ I think I enlisted myself as his Irish promoter!! It is safe to say that after him signing my hand I will never wash it again!!!!

A swim in the university fountain was a good way to end a great night and a great three months at Ole Miss...

We are now on our way to San Francisco to begin a three week period of travel... we were only about 30lbs total overweight :s Looking forward to seeing more of America but am sad that I may never see Oxford again.... good times and great memories!!