New Adventures and ways to get sore muscles

It has been about one month since I wrote the last post. I apologize to everyone who has waited desperately for news and didn´t get any. Since spring break a ton of things changed and happened. Louisville won the National Championship for Basketball, which was a great game, because Michigan lead with 38-37 at half, but lost 76-82 after the second half. There were generally a ton of National College Championships in all the different sports, but they are not as popular as March Madness. Other things, that happened in sport are the Masters Golf Tournament, which for the first time was won by an Australian player and the playoffs for Hockey of the NHL started about 3 days ago. The biggest thing that happened with national attention was the Bombing in Boston on April 15th and the one week hunt for the suspects in one of the suburbs of the city. It was everywhere in the news. Another big thing that happened here in grand rapids and area were the torrential rains for about six days straight, which resulted in the most rainfall in a month since 1896. All rivers in Grand Rapids and surroundings rose so much, that a ton of streets had to be closed, bridges had to be made heavier to not get flushed away, the two towers next to the river in downtown Grand Rapids had to be evacuated and millions of dollars in waterdamage emerged. At the dam in downtown Rockford the local maintenance people had to open gates to prevent the adjacent areas from flooding. Things that changed for me were mainly in school. The water polo team from Rockford had a lot of off season practices, which I attented just for fun. We set up the field and played for 2 hours straight every time. It was really hard to play against people, who have played water polo since 6th Grade. I didn´t have the technique and strength to guard people, which means prevent them from shooting at the goal. Swim season helped me a lot, because I´m now as fast as most of the sophomores and juniors from the polo team. I even scored two goals, but missed a lot of shots, too. It was a ton of fun and a great opportunity to get some more workout and learn new technique for when I´m back in Germany and we play water polo in school. I also played soccer with some guys from the water polo team. It was great and I´m definately more dominant in soccer than in water polo 🙂 , but after the first time I had sore muscles for four days. The Rockford Girls Water Polo Team have a great season. They had an Invitational Tournament about two weeks ago with some teams from Michigan and two great teams from Illinois. They got second overall in the Tournament and lost the final game fairly close. In about four weeks they have their State Championship Tournament at Rockford High School and hope to defend their title from last year. The next big thing coming up in just one week is Prom. It is so big! Everyone rents dresses and tuxedos, spents $50 per ticket and there are some great things going on with asking girls for prom. Probably everyone wants to know whether I asked somebody and who. I did and I asked Adrianna Craft. She is a senior and swims and plays water polo pretty successfully. She was an All American water polo player last year, which means top 100 water polo players of the nation and just got advanced in the Olympical Developmental Program to the top 50 players, out of who the top 15 girls will go to the International Junior Olympics. I asked her after one of the water polo games at home with a selfmade cake. It was just a rectengular white frosted base with Prom, a question mark, her name and the face of an otter written and sketched with frosting on top of it. She said yes and in a few hours I´m getting hopefully my tuxedo fitted for it. Now are only barely two months left in my exchange year, but I already know, that I can visit a good friend of Gudrun in New York City for a few days and I hope the summer is warm enough to go a lot to the beach on Lake Michigan. I haven´t taken a lot of pictures since my last post, but I will definately post some after the prom weekend.