Laurenz Walter

2009-10 Inbound from Austria

Hometown: Millstatt, Austria

Sponsor: Spittal/Dran Rotary Club, District 1910, Austria

Host: Mandarin Rotary Club, District 6970, Florida, USA

School: Bartram Trail High School, St. Johns, Florida

Bio

Laurenz' Bio

Hey! My name is Laurenz Walter and I’m a Rotary Exchange Student from Austria. I’m sixteen years old and I’m currently staying with Robert and Barbara Hiler in St. Johns, near Jacksonville.

I’m from the southern state of Austria called Carinthia. My hometown, Millstatt, is about an hour away from Italy, so I already knew the beach, but the beaches there are a way different from the beaches in Florida, because the waves in Florida are a lot bigger . That’s one of the reasons, I tried to arrange a stay in Florida, because I really want to learn how to surf! My hobbies are playing guitar and singing (formerly in a band in Austria, before I left, we played Alternative/Indie/Rock), skiing and snowboarding (I’m instructor for both), soccer and beach volleyball. But I also really like just to chill with my friends. I started skiing when I was 3 years old and in all the 13 winters after beginning, I tried to go skiing every weekend, at least twice. But after a while just going down the slopes became boring, so I started free-riding, which I really love and already did a competition in Austria. I know that skiing is impossible in Florida, but I’ll try to survive this time .

I’m already nearly 3 weeks in St. Johns and I just can say: It’s awesome! I’m really happy with my host family, they are better than you can imagine. I don’t have other host families yet, but I will let you know, as soon as I know.

The school is very easy, but of course, there is still the language problem, if I have to write a long essay in English, although I understand everything they say and I can also say what ever I want to.

At last I just wanted to say thank you to Rotary, because they give me the opportunity to stay in Florida and I’m really happy that I was elected to represent Austria in the United States for the next following months. I will try to do my best.

October 14 Journal

Hey everybody who follows my journal (so probably not a lot of people but anyway )!

If anybody read my biography, this person will know that I wrote that my time in Florida was amazing and that I loved it. Well, nothing changed! I’m still doing great! I love it here and I don’t even want to think about the point when I have to leave and go back to Austria. I love spending time here and I’m actually kind of surprised that I’m already here for 2 months!!!! It’s just unbelievable how the time passed by.

Now to my “ordinary” life here! What I mainly do here, is going to school and then meeting friends and doing sports. I will probably start a band with a friend and we will play in coffee shops like Starbucks and we will play acoustic/surf/alternative rock and I will join a soccer team! First I wanted to play for the school team, but I don’t want any longer, because I realized that they have practice every day and if I would join them, I wouldn’t have time for anything else. The club team I will hopefully join, only practices two times a week, which is not much but then I still have time to go surfing after school and I’m just flexible every day.

On the weekends I go surfing with my friends, most of the time with one of my best friends, who is sponsored by the surf-brand “Quicksilver”. I don’t need to say that he’s amazing at surfing and after we went to the beach, I always try to learn him some songs on the guitar. He’s doing quite well. And today I will get my own surfboard from another friend for a really low price! I’m just really happy that I don’t have a hard time like other exchange students I talked to and that I have a lot of friends and always something to do.

I visited St. Augustine a lot of times for surfing and also just for walking down the shopping street and admiring America’s oldest town. I even visited the Alligator Farm which was really exciting for me, although it’s already the second alligator farm I visited in my life, because I saw one when I was in Cuba with my family, but it was still an exciting and funny adventure with my host mum. And now Halloween is coming up and I hope I can go down to Orlando with some of my friends but I don’t know if that will work out because the park we want to visit is really expensive and I need my money to buy a wetsuit for December and January when I want to surf and it’s colder than right now (by the way: I love the hot weather here!).

At the end of this journal entry I just want to thank Rotary again for giving me such an opportunity and that they gave me my host family I’m currently staying with! I really like them and they are so nice and funny and sometimes we just sit in the living room and talk. They are the best host family and if they ever decide to host another exchange student after me, this person is going to be incredibly lucky to stay with Robert and Barbara!!!

May 16 Journal

Hey!

I know that it took me a while to write my second journal entry, but I’m really enjoying my time here so much, I don’t have a lot of time to sit in front of my computer and write about what’s actually going on in my life.

Well since my last journal entry a lot of stuff happened.

Before Thanksgiving I got a message from Rotary that I will move to another host family on the 5th of December, 3 days before my birthday.

So I really wanted to enjoy the last days with Barbara and Bob. For Thanksgiving Barbara and I went to North Carolina to visit her best friend in Charlotte. It was a lot of fun and I met all of her friends and we all had an amazing time together. We played pool everyday and the food for Thanksgiving was amazing.

When I came back, I moved to the Grimes family. I met Andrea, my host sister and we immediately became brother and sister. Also Bill and Lynnell, my host parents, were awesome from the beginning on. I have fun with all of them, and my parents back in Austria know that they are the best exchange parents anybody could have. That’s why we all decided, with Rotary’s approval, that I will stay with them to the end of my exchange year.

After my birthday celebration with the Grimes, I had to go to Disney World with Rotary. It was an awesome weekend, which I will never forget. The Rock’n’Rollercoaster was definitely my favourite rollercoaster of all times. I rode it about 5 times and we had so much fun.

After this weekend, I celebrated Christmas with the Grimes and then New Years with Rotary at a house on the river, which was amazing, because we saw all the fire works in entire Jacksonville. When I came back on the first of January, we celebrated my host dad’s 50th birthday and after that, it got more quiet for two months until the trip to the Keys came, again with Rotary. At this trip, I became so good friends with some exchange students, that I will never forget them and they will always be in my heart. I don’t want to sound emotional or anything, but if you become an exchange student, you will meet a lot of special people in your year, but the ones, who share the same experiences become your family. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, India, Turkey, Norway and so many other countries, where you have brothers and sisters from now on.

Also Rotary becomes a part of your family. They will always be there for you and you can rely on them, for example the counsellor you get from your host club, is one of the people you can tell everything, and they help you as good as they can.

Well, all these brothers and sisters became even closer members of my “family”, when I went to Hawaii with a lot of them.

I found a lot of guys who I can call “brother from another mother” and they can say the same about me. But I don’t want to tell you so much about the trips we made, I want to tell you how it is, being an exchange student, especially the time I’m going through right now. I really don’t want to leave the United States of America. I remember the feeling when I left Austria, it was the weird feeling you have, when you’re about to leave home for a year. Well, now I have the feeling I have to leave home again, to go back to Austria. All the friends and experiences I made here, will always be a part of my life of course, but I don’t only want them to be memory, I want to have them with me. The ideal world for me right now, would be Austria and the U.S. combined, so I can have both worlds I’m living in, together in one terrific country, where all my friends and family members are together.

I know that might sound weird for people who didn’t go through the same thing I am going through right now, but it is the truth. You have family and friends who will miss you a lot when you leave them, but at the same time you are going back to your real family and your friends. It is a feeling that is hard to describe, but not because it has only bad aspects. It feels good, knowing that you always have people you can count on, if you have problems in your life, and they will always be there for you, because they make up 50 per cent of your best friends, although you only spent a year with them, but you made such a strong bond, that will never break.

I will write another journal soon, I promise, and I apologize again that it took me so long, but Florida is a state where you go with your friends to the beach or play football in somebody’s back yard and not a place where you are bored… It is my home.

And thank you Rotary for this year, you made that happen and I will never forget that. Rotary Youth Exchange certainly changed my life.

May 24 Journal

Hello again 

I know I just wrote a journal entry, but I felt kind of bad that I didn’t write one for so long, that’s why that one is the second one in such short time.

This time I want to tell you about my life with my new host family and the trip to Hawaii.

When I first moved in the Grimes house, I was concerned of course, if they are gonna like me and how everything will go, because every family is different and has different rules and activities. But when I first came over for dinner one night and met Bill, Lynnell and Andrea, I knew, that I will enjoy my time a lot. They truly are my second family and I’m sure I will never forget them and that I will keep in touch with them.

Andrea, who is a three times national champion with “Large Varsity Hip Hop” with my school’s dance team (Bartram Trail High School) became immediately my sister, and I got to know all her friends, and a lot of them became also really good friends of mine. I hang out with them a lot, and we do all kind of fun stuff.

Of course her dance team, which is very famous and from most people’s perspective the best hip hop school dance team ever, determined some of my weekends, which I was totally O.K., because I really enjoy watching the team under their Coach “Coach A”.

After some competitions, which they won of course, they went to the state championship, which they finished first, and then went to the National Championship Competition in Orlando. I got to meet all the girls on the dance team and became good friends with some of them, and also their boyfriends became really good friends of mine.

When they went to nationals, I just came home from my trip to Hawaii, which I want to talk about first.

Well, I actually could describe it with one word: “Amazing”, but for the readers who didn’t have the opportunity to go to this extraordinary vacation island yet, I will try to tell about the trip more than just describing it with one word. Well, everything started in Florida on a really early morning. My host dad took me to the airport, where I met some other exchange students from our district who were about to board the same plane as I did. When we arrived after the really long plane trip, we got picked up by the members of our travel organization BELO USA. From then the whole adventure began. It was amazing. I just give you a brief list of all the places we went to and all the activities we were able to participate in. On the first day we went on a catamaran and out on the ocean and then shopping and beach. I really don’t remember the exact day but we had surfing lessons, we went to North Shore to see the really big waves and to the Pineapple plantation “Dole”. We also saw a Cultural Center and went on countless tours to the mall, where I spent way too much money, because, yes Hawaii is probably one of my favorite vacation places, but it’s expensive. We also went to a bay, that was so unbelievable pretty and reminded me of vacations I took with my parents before, because the water was about as beautiful as it was in the Maldives. Everybody snorkeled there, but guess what? Not me…  I had to stay out of the water because I had an ear infection, which sounds like nothing to people who didn’t have it before, but I promise you guys, an ear infection hurts like crazy, but I was very happy that it was gone after 2 days.

So, after all this the last day came, and everybody was sad to leave Hawaii. It was our last night and I was about to pass out in my bed, but then I took one quick last look on the screen my roommate and me where watching a television show on, and the information I got, gave me a shock. On the bottom of the TV there was a line: “Tsunami warning for Hawaii after earthquake in Chile”. Well, my first thoughts were: “Awesome, I’m really lucky, and now I will die in a beautiful vacation place like Hawaii. My roommate and me woke up other people and we were all in one room and everybody was about to freak out if they didn’t yet. Girls were crying and guys were scared, even if they would never admit it now. I can tell you, I don’t get scared easily at all, but all of the sudden I had a really weird feeling when I thought about the huge wave that’s about to hit Hawaii and our hotel was at the beach, and all of the sudden, every conversation I had with my friends, which I surf with, was forgotten. We talked about how we would go out there if there would be a tropical storm in Florida or even a tsunami, but if you are actually in the situation, you don’t think about surfing…at least I don’t.

We all waited until Zeeshan and I woke up Rafael, our guide. We decided to leave the hotel in the morning, but at the end nothing happened. The tsunami died before it hit Hawaii and we were all happy to live. We came back to the hotel and checked out, because it was our last day in the hotel.

When I came home, Andrea and Lynnell picked me up from the airport, and honestly, I felt kind of special being able to say: “I survived a tsunami”, although I know that is dumb.

Well shortly after I came home, I spent the weekend in Orlando for Andrea’s Dance Competition. It was crazy. They were in the Hard Rock Café in Universal and I was so nervous, I have never felt like this before. I was so nervous for her and all the dance team members, I didn’t know that I could be that nervous. I seriously freaked out when they went on stage on Saturday and got first with a 9. and qualified for Sunday, where they won with 9.88 out of 10 points. It was incredible and I was so happy for my host sister. I was never nervous before a soccer game or when I had gigs with my band, but this time, I freaked out, and it was for somebody else.

I hope you enjoyed reading this,

Peace

Laurenz