SNOW!!!

This post is quite short, mostly because I have not been taking many photos. While I totally want to blame it on being in the moment and always being busy with something, I will try my best to take a bunch of photos, especially with the holidays coming up. I also said I would post again before December in my last blog post, so this is also so past me can save face. I will almost certainly post twice in December, as I can kind of feel things picking up (yet again another promise that I might end up breaking).

School has once again been mostly the same. The math teacher finally realized that I am not Czech. Other than that nothing much happens in school. I did sign up for a school floorball tournament in December. I have never played floorball before, so I am really hoping my classmates can carry the team to victory. I will tell you all how it goes next month.

Apple pie. The lattice lid was a big pain in the butt but at least it looked nice for Thanksgiving.

Snowy view from my bedroom. It’s awesome.

I have still been going to orienteering practices, though the races have ended with the cold weather. The team I am with had a special weekend practice trip, where we practiced navigating on some strange maps. I had a blast getting lost in the rainy woods. With the race season being over, we have made more progress on the local orienteering course. This weekend we went out in the woods to mount 12 or so posts.

Dance lessons are also coming to an end. I think the last practice is in 2 or 3 weeks. I don’t have anything else to say about the practices, I just wanted to let Mom and Dad and Emily know so they can stop pestering me about how good I must be (I’m not).

I also had a rotary meeting in Znojmo, which is south near the border with Austria. We went bowling, and I made triple digits for the first time. I don’t have photos of it, just trust me.

Thanksgiving happened, although it only took place in my household, as well as in the English classes I attend. There was still school because it isn’t a holiday here. I was going to surprise my host family by cooking a traditional thanksgiving meal (limited to whatever ingredients I could get my hands on), but they also decided to surprise me, so they bought some ingredients as well. This has led to a great excess of turkey in our fridge. I couldn’t find canned pumpkin (not surprising), so I made an apple pie instead. One thing that was surprisingly easy to find was cranberry sauce. It is much more common in the cuisine here, so there were a bunch of jars in the grocery store.

My host family eating the Thanksgiving dinner. We still have leftover turkey.

Snow finally arrived on Black Friday, and it has been snowing on and off for the past couple of days. We have about an inch or so of snow as of now. To be honest, I was going a little crazy hearing about the record snow in Anchorage as it rained in my town. Although it is far from skiable, the snow has completely transformed the town from a dreary autumn to a cozy winter. Unfortunately, it is most likely going to melt before Christmas, but I am going to act like that’s not true for the next 2 weeks. I spent this Saturday out in the snowy woods setting up the orienteering course, and the weather was amazing. Not too cold, and with a little snow, but still sunny. I was so excited to finally use the winter hat and gloves I brought with me. I slipped a lot though, because I don’t have winter boots yet.

Looking back as I write this I realize I kind of lied about the post being short. I guess a lot more happened in the past 2 weeks than I previously thought. I still don’t have many photos, though.

Thanks, Bye!