so here i am again in my favourite state! i've been here now for quite some time, i left New Hampshire on the 30th of August and ever since then i'm in the sunflower state! i have been living with my host mom and on the weekends i live with my friends who are at college carly & shay. It's pretty weird to be "on vacation" when everyone around you has to go to school or work...but it's fun anyways. I ride a lot because we have friends with a lot of horses and we have horses ourselves so we take them out and ride them all the time. Last week i even competed in a rodeo :-)! That was incredibly much fun! We all got there with two big horsetrailers and Mandy, Zach, Madison, Darren, Ricky and me competed in the events! the cool thing was that we had probably around 20 people from our families watching us, so we had this great fancrowd that cheered for every one of us as if it was the world championships :-)! I competed in four different categories: Western Pleasure, Barrels, Poles and Flag Race. Western Pleasure is a lot like western dressage, the judges are standing in the middle of the arena and judge you while you have to ride a certain pattern that they announce over the speakers. I even made third in that category :-)! Barrel racing is definately one of my favourites! you have three barrels that stand on the corners of a triangle and you have to ride around them full speed as fast as you can! it's so much fun! my horse annie and me did it actually in 24 sec which was pretty awesome! then we did the poles, that's eight poles on the ground that you have to weave through as fast as possible, that was really hard. and last and also one of my favourites: the flag race. they put a barrel on the end of the arena with a flag on top of it. the goal is to race to the barrel, go around it and take the flag and then bring the flag back as fast as you can! we were super fast on that one and placed fifth wich is really good, because neither me or annie have done this before and there were like a ton of people competing :-)! so our first rodeo together was really successful, i was incredibly proud of her, she really did amazing and it was so much fun! carly picked me up from the rodeo and we went to her college. the rodeo wasn't over until like 11 at night so we didn't get to bed that night until like 12:30. at 1:30 though we were rudly awaken by nothing else but the fire alarm! we both had at first no idea what was going on until we realized that it was the fire alarm and that the chances that this is just a practice drill pretty slim are at 1:30 in the morning. so we streamed out of the dorms, together with all the other confused people and when we got to the first floor we could see a ton of smoke in the hallway and the smell was horrible. when we were outside they finally told us what had happened: a girl had made popcorn in the microwave and she had put the popcorn in for 7 minutes! crazy americans...after standing what felt like an hour in the cold outside they finally let us back in and we could finish out beauty sleep. That weekend was really fun, we went to the state fair, that had started that weekend and shaylin came down from macpherson to ride rides with us at the fair. we also watched a college football game and to a party :-) lots of fun! monday night carly drove me to shaylin's college and i stayed the night there and the next day shaylin drove me back to wichita.
oh and i've also become an assistant soccer coach :-). my little host brother phillip plays soccer now and when i went to one of his practices and susan told the coach that i'm from germany and used to play soccer he asked me if i would like to help him coach :-)...that's why i have spend the last weekend watching three soccer games and playing coach :-) lots of fun, except for the fact that we loose all the time...
well that was my update from the sunflower state! i'm not gonna be here much longer, i'll be leaving KS on the 25th for NYC! there i'll stay for two days until the 27th when i'll go on the long journey back to germany where i'll arrive on the 28th! I'll be arriving in Paf on Sep 28 at 12:23p.m.! i can't wait to see y'all again!!!
P.S.: I actually created a photo gallery now :-)! unfortunately i haven't managed to upload the pictures from my camera yet, so these are pictures from my friends and of poor qualitiy...but at least now you can see a little bit more of my life!
