Summer Recap

So the Summer is wrapping up.. school starts in ~1 week. Which is a scary thought for me, as always time has flown by so fast. I've had a good summer. In a way I am glad that school is back, just because it always reinstates a purpose, a schedule. I'll just share a couple of the highlights of my Summer...

Back In The Air Again..

So this is just a quick update on what's been happening lately.

School ended about 10 days ago, I flew back here to the desert.. Been hanging around, saw some people and what not. Now I'm heading to Windsor, Ontario -Canada- for the start of real Summer Vacation. (My Grandparents live there) Me, my little sister and my mom are leaving tonight and my dad and older sister will be arriving later in the week. It should be a good time, my Grandparents are celebrating their 50th Wedding Anniversary! So yep.. that's the next couple weeks for me, lots of reading, biking and relaxing.


--
Zach

A Broken Record..

Well, I'm back in the UAE now, on Summer Vacation!!
I probably sound like a broken record, saying that I'm going to write another post soon.. well this time I really am. I hope to be able to write an update about once a week during the Summer, just brief updates so I don't write a monster every month..

Yearbook

This is just a quick update..

So this past week back at school has been so busy. Especially this past couple days. The Yearbook is supposed to be done by now, so a bunch of the team has been working all day and night.I really enjoy it.. Something really cool is that I'll get to spend a couple days in France this coming week.. Sunday-Wednesday, Me and two other students will be going to the printers (of the yearbook) to coordinate things and get the printing started. I defiantly wasn't the first choice of people to go, but I'm really glad I can go.
And parents, thanks for sending the permission slip so fast!!
It's a 5 hour drive there, so I'm going to have plenty of time to get my homework done --and write a more thorough update of what I've been up to.

Chicken, Homeless Shelter, the Rhine.. Oh My!

So once again, this is the first time that I've written anything in a long time, and I fell bad about that.. but thankfully I finally have some time to kill here in the Istanbul Airport. Lots has happened in the past month or so..

I'll start with last weekend, I'm pretty sure it was last week, was a reealy busy one. After school on Friday, I talked with some people after school and mozyed around town, and made my way back up to the dorm eventually.. When I got back I saw some guys out on this grassy feild area thats near the dorm playing Ultimate Frizbiee, unfortunatly, by the time i changed into some clothes that could get dirty (it had rained recently, so it was muddy), the frizbiee game had morphed into a mud fight. After we finish things up and start heading down to the dorm, Cory (one of the RAs) comes out.. takes one look at us and trys to get away.. well once he got muddy we decided to go for round two back in the mud.
On our way down this time, we saw a couple of Palm girls in this little playground thing right between the dorm and the grass, we decided to try to freak them out.. on the count of three, 10 muddy (mostly shirtless) guys charged at them.. It took a couple seconds for it to register, but when it did.. they screamed and ran, luckly for us.. we had an alabi, it was April Fools! Man who would've thought that water and dirt could be so fun?!

Off to retreat.

So I don't have alot of time to write right now, but I wanted to share a couple of things quickly. On Friday the whole High School is going on a retreat to Lenk Switzerland for the weekend, should be really fun.. The weather is finaly getting nicer.. the sun is coming out more, I've been going on lots of walks, exploring and such.

I'll make sure to write a more detailed post on Monday, since we have it off.

Home...

Well, once again I apologize for taking so long to post something. Several times I started but I never finished and then finals came and life got really busy, but now I have a 6 hour plane ride to write.

I really don't know where to start, so much has happened, in the past weeks and since I started my adventure of boarding school. I suppose I could start with today and work backwards..

Here today, gone tomorrow.

So today I started the real journey, right now I'm on a plane over the British Isles; its another hour or so till we reach Franfurt.. from there we'll rent a car and drive about two hours to Ludwigsburg, Germany where we'll be staying with some friends for a couple days, then we drive another two hours to Kandern, Germany -BFA. I found out what dorm i'll be in, it's called "Maugenhard". Unlike most of the other dorms, it's in the town/village of Kandern and it's about a kilometer (about half a mile) away from the school itself.

Todays plan is fly from Detroit to Frankfurt, drive 2 hours from Frankfurt to Ludwigsburg.

This plane ride (Detroit-Frankfurt) has been not bad, pretty empty so I get two seats to myself. The food was okay.. it was a lactose-free one which for some reason means it has to be healthy or something, the main course was a vegetable dish of some-sort, with rice and instead of a brownie I got fruit, no bread, just a rice cake..  I'm not against healthy food or anything, but the differences are interesting. The only sad part about this flight was saying goodbye to my Grandparents and my Sisters.

Breakfast is being served now, it's 6:46(AM) in Germany and 12:46(AM) in Canada. So far I've watched  "Mr. Fantastic Fox" and "Iron Man 2" I honestly don't know why I watched Iron Man 2 again.. Mr. Fantastic Fox was pretty good, exceptional as far as stop motion goes. The story was pretty good.. it reminded me of Chicken Run in some ways. Yippe yay.. it looks like breakfast is a vegetarian breakfast burrito/tortilla with a couple pieces of mellon and applesauce. What?! I get like 3 pieces of mellon and my Dad gets strawberries and kiwi?! How do they have milk in them? Haha -the wrapper on my burrito thing has three different "special meal things, VGML-Vegan Vegetarian Meal, VLML-Western Vegetarian Meal and NLML-Non Lactose Meal. Apparently western vegetarians aren't true vegetarians.

The other funny thing is, everyone addresses me in German.. like the guy was offering me coffee and then even when I replied in English, he asked if I wanted sugar or milk in German, same thing happened when we were in Switzerland. It'll be interesting when I get to Passport control because I'm entering Germany on my Swiss passport (because I can stay unlimitedly because even though Switzerland isn't in the EU, they allow Swiss citizens to have the same rights as an EU citizen) hopefully they won't question my Swissness because I don't speak German.
So I just had to show him my passport.. he said thank you, have a nice day and I just said "Danke" -thanks- back.

More, after the break:

Lots of things going on..

So this last week I did a lot.. It was my last week here in beautiful Oregon. First we went to the Art Gallery in Portland, one of their main exhibits was the entire book of Genesis (from the Bible) in graphic novel form.. I don't want to say "comic book" because it's more illustrated than cartoonish.. It really portrays the book of Genesis without leaving anything out.

On our way to the gallery we passed an organic food market which is where we had a very tasty lunch, after that we just walked around Portland.. we went to the river, then to a main square. Something totally different was passing this group of 20somethings sitting on the sidewalk smoking weed, right in downtown Portland with lots of people around.. You'd be executed or jailed/deported if you were caught even possessing drugs in the UAE. Portland is a very interesting and fun city.. Im sure it has "dangerous" spots.. but from what I've seen it's cool!

I'm Back..

I had a very fun few days, biking, playing tennis, fly fishing and relaxing. It's like a vacation from my vacation, it was my families vacation for the summer, but it was like vacation on steroids for me. On our first fishing expedition, we trolled for a couple hours but all we got was a couple "chubs" -supposedly they're not good for eating- it's funny because in Gulf Arabic "chub" means shut-up. I did however manage to get my knees sunburned, because I didn't bother to put sunscreen on my knees but the other parts that I did remained un-burned.

Driving up to the vacation home was boring as usual.. Something cool that I've gotten to see over the past few years is the recovery the forests have undergone since a massive forest fire decimated huge amounts of the forests in the area.. that was 7 (i think) years ago. Now a lot of the area has been re-planted and stuff but there's hundreds of acres that are just burned trees..

Oh yeah.. something that made me feel stupid was that I forgot my battery charger and battery in Canada. So I couldn't take any pictures with my dSLR.. >_<

Thoughts on a Plane

Today is the 4th of July.. Happy Independence Day. Yay.. [it was actually the 5th.]
Dang. I forgot about Canada day (which was on July 1st) but that shows you how little I consider myself to be Canadian or American for that matter. I'd say I'm mostly American/Canadian by passport only.. which is funny because in some places you can get a passport by owning land or just investing money and besides almost anyone can become an Canadian. Well.. I could ramble all day about citizenship and passports and how I don't know where I'm from.


I'm bored.. this plane ride is like 3 and a half hours long and I really don't feel like sitting and doing nothing. There's internet but checking Facebook or reading articles on Wired or Lifehacker isn't worth $15 and my battery isn't fully charged, so even though I'd have internet for the whole flight, only part of the time would I even be able to use it.  [I thought it'd be cool to write what ever comes to mind and then share those thoughts with the world on my blog.]

In Canada..

So I'm done with Missouri for now, I had a fun time in Kansas City. The weather there was interesting, as a friend put it: "The weather's is so schizophrenic." I have to agree with him, there were a lot of sudden changes in the weather.. but seeing lots of rain was really nice to have rain.

And so the journey begins..

Yesterday, I left the UAE and I started the adventure of boarding school. I flew from the UAE to Frankfurt, Germany; after waiting around for 7 hours, in which I drew, read and wrote mostly.. The thing that drove me crazy was watching the same exact news-cast over and over agian.