The start of... summer vacation??

It feels ridiculous that it's July 28 and my summer vacation has barely started. To be accurate, it started about 12 hours ago. That's when I finally finished taking the DAT at the Prometric Test Center, and after clicking the "End" button, I was finally free. I did slightly better than I expected, and it was comforting receiving the score immediately after testing. The remaining afternoon and evening was spent playing Axis and Allies with my brother - which turned out to be a hilarious 6-hour long back-and-forth sequence of Japanese attempting to invade Washington, DC. Meanwhile I was trying to forget that in a week my semester at Singapore starts.

This summer was an overwhelming learning experience. The most basic thing I learned is that I am never going to overload my summer again. Taking lecture and lab courses + doing research (into human vivisection among other less interesting matters) + studying for the DAT meant that I had a busier time than probably both of my previous semesters combined. Summer classes take up the majority of the time, but research doesn't alleviate the mind when the anatomy details come back and haunt me with gruesome descriptions of humans getting cut up alive. Of course, there were those dreams. I'll share two.

1. I'm in some high school hallway except it is mostly empty save a random girl, me, and two very hungry velociraptors. I got eaten twice.
2. Al Qaeda has caused a majority of passenger airplanes to lose power midair and crash. The catch? One of those planes has a nuke aboard. I was standing in an opening in a forest along with a huge crowd of other hysterical people watching as yet another plane hurled toward the ground, hoping that the last thing we see won't be a mushroom cloud. The last thing in the dream was me getting rescued by military Apache helicopters, and from there on the dream didn't make sense.

So my short 1-week long "vacation" will be in the majority spent in that awkward altered physical state known as jet lag. The rest of my waking moments will involve touring around Japan frantically for 5 days while using my gaijin language skills. I hope I run into some hilarious sidewalk personalities. And then I'm off to Singapore, arriving there on the midnight before semester begins. Yay.