The last fortnight has been just a little bit crazy. I’m now into the exam period, and the last leg of my undergraduate degree, so in just over 25 days I should be free from academia until at least September (when, all things going to plan, I should be starting a masters at Universiteit Leiden). Technically this continuation of studies makes me no more liberated from scholarly endeavours than any other summer holiday for the past three years has done, but the feeling of getting away from all the problems of MMU and letdowns of Manchester (don’t get me wrong, the place has its good points, they just seem outnumbered sometimes) is one I look forward to very much.

Last week I had a very poorly timed trip to Maastricht for the FYEG General Assembly. It was much fun, but I couldn’t get the guilt of not being at home revising for my human rights exam out of my head. As usual, the Netherlands proved itself to be beautiful and almost perfect in every way. I say almost perfect, because the darker side of one of the city parks was revealed on Saturday night, when two FYEGers were subject to a homophobic attack on their walk back to the hostel. The injuries weren’t too severe, though they looked painful. Of all the places for such an attack to happen, I wouldn’t have thought of Maastricht. I guess it shows how much work greens and other tolerant people have left to do.

Just now though, I’m trying to avoid too much politics until I get finals out of the way. It’s a task easier said than done when revising for a green politics exam.

Woohoo! My exams are over. I’m officially still in term time, but in reality I’m on holiday until September. Not that its all going to be resting. I have quite a lot of projects on the go at the moment, and I should probably make a start on my dissertation over the summer.

I spent the weekend in Berlin, at the Federation of Young European Greens General Assembly. It was very interesting. At quite a few points, I was totally lost in the European variant of English that seems to have developed (manifestation is used to mean demo, odd), and a couple of times, I’m shamed to admit, I wasn’t completely sure what I was voting for. I didn’t get much chance to do touristy things, but I did see the Tiergarten and travel around Berlin on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn a little bit. I’ve also managed to become the subject of gossip among the DWARS delegation and one of the new executive committee members. Maybe I’ll go into that in another post though.