Missing: 4 months and focus

I cannot believe that I leave Estonia for good in a month. I know this is how things go, and how people said it would. But to be in the cross paradox of everything is a little mind blowing. The first days of ice, snow, and sledding seem like a year ago, but it feels like I've only been here a couple of weeks all at the same time. Last week I was more than ready to come home. I was just done being here, I'm sure you all know what I mean. But now that days are flying past, I'm realizing the people and aspects of life here that I will miss.
Spring has finally truly come to us. I think my concentration and focus on school work faded along with the cold. All I want to do now is be outside, and doing really anything other than sitting at my desk working. I have only 2 more papers of my Tartu University career, but it is just not getting done. I still find it strange that I never had a true test/exam this whole semester. The only things I have been graded on are papers, papers, papers, one essay exam, and one oral exam. This oral exam was for Archeology of the Ancient Near East, and my first one ever. The whole process was quite intimidating, and hopeless if you hadn't studied. This is how it went: the four of us that showed up for the exam sat in front of the professor as he wrote 5 subjects on the board. We volunteered for what order we would go in, and then picked a subject. With this subject, you were to say everything you could on the matter, and then wait for you slow and painful interrogation. I happily made it out with a B, but not with my pride. If this class was truly critical for my major I think I would have been mortified, but since it wasn't, the whole process was actually amusing. Our professor made every one of us look like idiots, no matter how smart the student. And it's not even that he was trying to, he was quite nice about the whole humiliation.
I've been trying to think some more about the culture here in Estonia and how to evaluate it. I have a friend who is currently in New Zealand, and when I asked him about the people there, he said that they were both similar to and different from Americans, but he couldn't pin point the "why" of either. I think this describes exactly my experience. Every where I have gone this semester, it seems that there are obvious differences and similarities to America, but then this whole underlying layer of subtleties that I can't put my finger on. I think similarities between places I have visited and home might have a lot to do with globalization mixing up all kinds of cultures. There are distinct foods and styles that belong to countries, but they have all been traded and spread around. It becomes hard to weed out what belongs to a country and what doesn't.