Well, it'll all be over in a couple of hours...

Last final at 6PM. First year is under the belt and it's been quite a ride. Next year should be interesting, since I'll get my first crack at some international classes--first up is international tax. That field could be my ticket back to where the action is, along with anything I can pick up in oil & gas. I got an email from Western Kazakhstan this week--things are going full steam there, and they're only going to get hotter.

By the time I'm good to travel again, both of Russia's mammoth state-owned energy companies, Rosneft and Gazprom, will be publicly-traded firms not just in Moscow, but in London as well. There'll probably also be a number of Kazakh and some Azeri firms trading on the London Exchange, too (Sarbanes Oxley has scared them off the US exchanges). At the same time, South American energy sources are falling further and further under state control, and the Middle East isn't in danger of becoming overly stable any time soon. Hopefully all this will translate into someone, somewhere, willing to put me back on a plane bound for terra incognita. It's a brave new world, droogies, and we got to get out there in the middle of it.