"Study" Abroad

As I've mentioned many times, the classes I took here were rather easy and often times a bit of a joke. It's a shame I wasn't challenged here more, but it made my time here more comfortable being able to focus on other things than school all the time. It's pretty much been like a 5 month vacation, and I've had lots of time to meet new people, travel the country, and experience a new culture.
    I'm officially done with the school portion of my program as of this morning when I took my last "final."  For my modern history class, we wrote a five page paper in Spanish on a book that our professor had us "read" in English. Mine was about Oliver Cromwell. For our final, we had to talk to our professor, one on one, about the book we read. The professor also said she would ask us a couple questions about the material from the semester. So I studied a good half hour the night before to prepare to say anything I possibly could about Europe been 1300 and 1700. If I didn't understand the question or know the answer, I was prepared to talk about something I did know, maybe Europe during the Renaissance, or just show the professor that I know how to talk in Spanish proficiently. Normally class is between 9 am and 12 on Thursdays, so I figured I would show up around 10 to take a turn speaking with the professor. I also expected a bunch of people from class to be there and a giant line, but turns out it was only the five of us foreigners there waiting to take the test, and these 5 showed up at 8 to take the final and took about 5 minutes each, so at 9, when I was still sleeping, Skylar called me to tell me that the professor was going to leave soon, and I better get to the university to the my final before she leaves. So I rushed into a cab and arrived right as it was my turn.
    Students here only take the final if they passed the other tests in the class throughout the semester. Not many passed all of the tests, so not many of them could take the final yet. They also get a lot of retries, so they can take the final multiple times and pretty much whenever they want. Most of the students in my class who did pass the other tests are going to take the final in December after having a month to study.
    In my final, the professor probably asked more about me than about the class, and we spent a few minutes talking about my experience abroad and where I'm from, then a couple quick minutes of me explaining the very basics of the life of Oliver Cromwell. She told me I passed, then after my turn, she fiddled around with some papers and stuff, then told all of us foreigners we all got 8s (out of 10), and all passed. So I guess it's a very fair situation: she put in about as much effort grading us and testing us as I put in to studying for the test.