Trying to top last weekend!

Hello!
Sorry for not writing sooner, its been a stupidly hectic week here though as you will soon discover!

Given that this blog is as much for my benefit as for you all to know what's been going on I really do want to include everything but I will still try to keep it shorter than last weeks I promise!

There have been a lot of crazy antics this week - a little bit of jumping in fountains for example which really should only be naturally expected from me by now and a little bit of bat-tastic adventure.

We went to South Congress bridge at sunset with a couple of friends from the Woo along with the leftovers from my birthday cake/thick chocolatey scrumptuous cheesecake and waited for the bats to fly out. There are literally thousands of them that live right under the bridge and at sunset every night they start swarming and people come to watch them as they make dust-like clouds across the sky. It was a little funny actually, we arrived to find they had already started and when they stopped me and Veema foolishly thought it was over but thankfully the guys were there with us and made us wait before leaving like a lot of the crowd did. You see, for some reason they fly out in waves, and I'd never seen so many bats in all my life - they could easily have been mistaken for starlings during migration.

We then got taken that same night to a place called Red Bud Isle which was actually just an access point to the Colorado River. We found a rope swing and were very tempted to start jumping in but we realised not only that we were in our work clothes still but also that the tide was moving way too fast to be safe - the drought is pretty much still ongoing and the river is seriously low.

Work this week has been pretty interesting, we've finished our research on Rage Killings now and have been assigned to write a motion relating to why elected judges should be excluded from Capital trials - this is great because I can use a lot of the same resources I did to write my human rights and the death penalty essay! We're also set to be assigned to a trial so will probably be working on jury selection sometime soon.

We're still trying to expand our friendship sphere at the moment and trying to keep up with all the people we've met so far. It's difficult of course because the novelty of our accents is starting to wear off a little but some people are still very keen to see that we have a good time. We hadn't much hoped to succeed but we aimed to top last weekend and to this end decided that our weekend would start on Thursday night. We didn't do very much, played some games with some neighbours and generally sat around chatting until the wee hours of the morning but we didn't have to go to work the next day so we wanted to make the most of it.

We spent the next day getting our social security cards and doing a little cheap shopping at a mall we finally found on the very outskirts of town. Most of the shops in town are stupidly expensive up and coming designers and so it had taken us quite a while to find anything reasonable. We struck gold though with this place - the food court was particularly nice, especially since they all give you tasters! - and I couldn't help indulging on a nice dress to go out salsa-ing in (though I'm pretty sure $20 doesn't count as indulgent).

We had planned that night to go to a salsa club with live music and a couple of guys we've been learning with but when we turned up we found out that the club on lets in under 21s on thursdays but it was ok because we discovered that one of the local gay clubs would let us in =D.

Saturday was spent at Barton Springs - a freshwater (and therefore apparently very cold) outdoor swimming pool. Veema froze and Shiraz thought it was freezing, but I just realised how they wouldn't be able to cope with the sea in Cornwall at Easter - pathetic both of them! Most people didn't go there to swim anyway actually, it was treated like a beach with grass instead of sand and it was quite late in the afternoon so thankfully people were starting to leave when we went. That night was karaoke - a truly asian phenomenon given that half of the songs the people we were with chose were sung in Korean!

We only managed about 4 hours sleep that night because Shiraz woke us up at 10am to invite us to Lake Travis. One of his friends was celebrating her birthday and he'd managed to get us spaces on the speed boat they were renting together. It was stupidly hot and despite my constant lathering with the factor 50 (which I got severely mocked for!) I still couldn't escape getting burned. Lake travis was completely worth it though, the guys knew what they were doing with the boat and we swam to shore from it when we came across a private beach festival - there was a live band playing Beatles songs and free food for everyone! The houses along the lake are rather large as well shall we say. Matthew McConoughey apparently owns one and Sandra Bullock comes to Austin quite frequently. The whole thing felt like living the life of the rich and famous for a day - the kind of thing you see in cheesy American movies!

We spent that evening pretty tired out and perhaps with a little bit of heat stroke watching the movie Finding Neverland and suddenly realising that Americans really do think we Brits still talk the way we did in the Victorian days - what a stereotype to have to try to overcome! Still, we persevere!

Love you all
Em xxx