It is the day I´m leaving short after midnight and I´m writing my last entry from this location in the USA. It was such an incredible year full of memories and awesome people. The time since my New York Trip has gone by so fast and was full of great memories. I attended the biggest graduation with about 8000 people and more than 600 graduates, went to many open houses of Graduates, visited Chicago again, had a great a week in Muskegon and hung out with friends a lot.

The time since prom has been very eventful and a lot of fun, although I already have to start to think about the day, when I have to leave my new home to go back to my old one. But I try to enjoy the time, which I think I am pretty successful at. Anyway Prom was incredibly awesome. All the Water Polo Players and I, had to change at the High School Pool at Zeeland High School, because the Girls Water Polo Team had their Districts Championship game only 2 hours prior to the Dance.

Additionally the game got delayed, because there was a power outage and in the end all the Polo players and their dates were about one hour too late, but it was no problem. We still got some of the great food and missed only a few minutes of the action on the dance floor. The location was great with a lot of space, a nice garden and a balcony above a illuminated pond. Additionally the weather was a lot better than the hours before with omly a few clouds and no rain at all. Basically perfect for a great prom night.

The DJ was pretty good, but he played too much country. A bit more of Rap and R&B wouldn´t have done any damage. But the dancing was great and I even got in the situation of totally failing the attempt of dancing walz with another german exchange student. A little embarrassing, but I have the defense of not have taken any dancing lessons 🙂 . After Prom, which unfortunately was too fast over at 11pm, I went with friends to an after party at a friends house and we were sitting around a barn fire, talking and freezing. But it was an incredible night, which I will never forget! The week before Prom was an Invitational Water Polo Tournament at Rockford High Schools and I went with Debbie, Robin and Robin´s dad and wife to the restaurant called „Corner Bar“. At this restaurant, one can try a Hot Dog Challenge which means to eat 12 hot dogs in less than 4 hours. I almost ate all of them, but the last half Hot Dog was too much to eat and outside I got pretty sick. It was a great experience to test your own boundaries and I am seriously considering to try it again, but not eating anything before it. It was very nice to get out of school, because I don´t have to deal with homework anymore, which was a ridiculous amount in the last couple weeks of school. It was sad at the same time, though, because I will probably see most of the people I did a lot of things at school never again.

But there was no time for being blue, because the next day the flight to new york required preparation. It was an awesome weekend, although the weather was not good for the first two days. I went to the high line, which is a transformed rail road track close to the Hudson River in Manhattan, I visited the National September 11th Memorial, which was impressive and sad at the same time, I visited the Museum of Natural History with its overwhelming amount of information and history, I had a nice barbecue and I went to the New Jersey shore with nice weather, and had a really good time! Now there are a bunch of Graduation parties coming up and the Graduation itself. I am pretty sure it will be a great time with a lot of great memories added to my experience here before going home.

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 water damage 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 attended 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 definitely 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, spends $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 Olympic 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 self-made cake. It was just a rectangular 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 definitely post some after the prom weekend.

More than half of the Spring Break is over and I´m so happy that we don´t have school. To get to sleep in is awesome. Unfortunately we didn´t go anywhere like Florida, Hawaii or California like most of my friends. It is getting warmer here though and the snow turned into rain, but you still can´t get tanned. The time after swim season was very relaxing, although my Aquatics class is almost like morning practice during season – I won´t get out of shape. And in my 500free I increased my time. Only about 2 seconds, but it felt good to see that I didn´t loose everything from season. We recently had an incredible production of Footloose in our High School. I saw it three times with different people and probably could have seen it more times. The cast was huge and all of them are so talented in acting and dancing. And the singing was awesome. Even an Exchange Student from Spain participated. Just an awesome musical.

A Fiddler on the Roof from the Civic Theatre with Amanda and Andrew in Cast and Crew was a great show and super successful. The second preformance and all following ones were sold out and they added one more, which was also sold out. The reviews and 4/4 stars in the Grand Rapids Press probably helped a lot. The next performance at Civic Theatre is the Musical „Legally Blond“, for which Andrew will probably audition too and the High School will do „Alice in Wonderland“ in May. In my English class I just finished to read „Twelth Night“ by Shakespeare. The language was pretty weird and hard to understand, including the mandatory „thy“ 🙂 . It felt like reading some of the Classics in German class.

Although it is still a little cold outside, we went on easter Sunday with most of the Playford family to a cornfield and started flying a training kite. It is about 3m long and even with not a lot of wind it can pull you pretty good. We even had two people getting pulled so strong they fell over. And it is almost like doing pull ups. The full sized Kite is with 12m across four times as big. I´m so excited to feel the drag from that one and eventually surf on Lake Michigan. There are a few pictures of not the best quality I took yet.