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Adam's Bio

Hello, my name is Adam. I am 17. I am from Warsaw, Poland. In Florida I live in small, beautiful city – Saint Augustine. I attend to Saint Augustine High School and I am a junior. It is 4 times bigger than my school in Poland. I love this school. I have basketball every day and 3 aerospace class which is really important for me, because I am working on my pilot license and flying will be big part of my future.

My biggest hobbies are flying and driving, but don’t worry I wont drive J. I like also ping pong, riding on bike, listen to music, playing video games, soccer and skiing. Saint Augustine is great place to learn surfing and skimboarding, I hope my host brother Ryan will help me to do that.

I am really happy to be here. It will be very big experience for whole my life.

THANK YOU Rotary Youth Exchange Florida!

September 23

Homesickness? What is that? 41 days on Florida and it is AWESOME! So much talking about homesickness on orientation and I still don’t know what is that… Most likely homesickness does not exist on Florida.

Lets start from the beginning… Orientation was great… meeting almost 80 exchange students from all over the world in 3 days …. Huh really hard to know them as much as I would like to, but enough to make friend with them.

School… 1800 students, 3 football fields, 8 tennis courts, 4 basketball fields, swimming pool, 4 huge parking lots, auditorium and gym that means very big school and I love it! People are very friendly like in whole US. They ask me so many questions about Poland, exchange and difference between Poland and US. I have lunch inside 4th period.. that’s crazy ;). I love my teachers. They are so friendly and they understand that it is my first month in American school.

Kennedy Space Center – what a small world, I met there Necdet Ergul and Jirawat Viraponsawan. Great surprise! This trip was awesome! I learned so many things about space, rockets and history. I met Astronaut there and took photo with him. What’s really funny we didn’t know that he is astronaut and we ask him where is cinema in Kennedy Space Center.

There were so many rockets I couldn’t count them! I hope I will come there see rocket launch.

I have wonderful time here in sun shine state – Florida and I can’t wait for Rotary meeting in St. Augustine and Disney !

December 30

Before I started writing my Journal I took calendar to my hand and check how long have I been in Saint Augustine and I couldn’t believe my eyes. It has been 4 months since I arrived. Time here is running quickly. Too quickly.

As an exchange student in USA I am supposed to discover American culture. One part of it is Thanksgiving. An awesome American holiday made to have a break of everyday life and eat as much food as possible and because I am an exchange student I did it. It was great. I cannot understand why we don’t have this holiday in Poland.

For Thanksgiving my host family took me to Tampa to their family where I met my Polish host grandma! She could speak Polish! It was really nice to hear my first language.

Later on we went boating in gulf of Mexico to catch some fish for dinner. I caught one small fish… probably because I am a really bad fisherman but my host brother Ryan caught a small shark. I was really excited because it was our first fish so I thought that I have some chances to catch shark too and tell everybody in Poland that I catch a shark but unfortunately it was first and last shark we caught.

After we finished shrimps to fishing we went to very small island in gulf of Mexico to search for some shells. They were everywhere! I took about 2 kilograms of big and nice shells and brought them home. I found also one sand dollar but unfortunately it get broken in box with other shells on the way back to Saint Augustine.

After that we went back home in Tampa and jump in to Jacuzzi and had a nice time talking about world. The Thanksgiving day we just ate everything you can think about.

March 14

It’s been a long time since I wrote my Journal last time. My English improved a lot, I have done many things and I really enjoy my time here. I wish I would be able to stay for longer than only 4 months. Temperature went up lately again! You can see surfers back on the beach (the crazy ones because temperature of water is still low). Florida is back to life after a winter!

Christmas! Unfortunately without snow… It was weird, my first Christmas without snow, I couldn’t feel that it is a Christmas time, oh well you can expect it in Florida finally it is a Sun shine state. Except for being disappointed due to not having snow my Christmas was great. I hanged out with my friends since Christmas break started. The day before Christmas day I spent with my first host family in full set eating and hanging out, the next day – the Christmas day I moved to my second host family to spend rest of Christmas with them. I got triple amount of gifts! (gifts from Poland were 2 months late but I still got them). Rest of my Christmas break I spent on getting to know my new host family and hanging out with my friends. It was awesome.

See Camp! In Florida Keys! Foretaste of Summer and opportunity to see my big exchange students family, get tent, meet some new people and rest from school! Finally, because the same class periods everyday make me really bored. Coming back to See Camp… It was fabulous! I had a lot of fun. We got opportunity to swim in the ocean in February without freezing to death. It was cold but worth it! Last day of our trip we went to visit Key West the most southern city of United States. I ate dinner in hard rock café with my new friends from Key West who were helping us in See Camp. I had a Burger with fries and coke as long as I am supposed to identify myself with American culture. Later on I went to gift shop and bought a hard rock café shirt with Key West sign on it just like a random tourist. After visiting Key West we all went back on the bus and travel about 10 hours back to home. 10 hours seems to be a horrible, long and tiring travel but as long as there were so many exchange students on the bus, we just made a huge party and the time went incredibly fast. By the end of it I wished that our travel would be longer because I enjoyed it so much. I think it doesn’t matter what are you doing with exchange students, it will always be lots of fun. They are Awesome!

Let’s come back to school and everyday life in Florida (sounds weird). I joined Tennis team to make sure that I won’t be bored after school and to learn how to play it. I have never played tennis before… I played table tennis and because they don’t have ping pong team in my school I thought that tennis would be similar... nothing more wrong! Tennis and Table tennis are two very different games when you play them. When you watch they might look similar but while you start to play you will notice big differences. Table tennis is a game of spin and control while tennis is a game of positioning and spin (my favorite part of ping pong) is not that important. After two months of practicing I am becoming better and moving up in our team. Right now I am in about 15th place out of about 35 guys which is not bad when you consider that I learned how to play 2 months ago while most of kids on our team have been playing already few years. It is pretty ironic that they didn’t allowed me to play soccer where I would definitely make it on to the team while they allowed me to play tennis where only players 1-6th are playing games and I can just sit, watch and hangout with other players not able to play. Let’s not come back to Soccer, I still feel sad when I think about it.

My weekends I usually spend with my friends hanging out. Mostly with Guilherme and Solene. They became my best friends for life. My brother and sister. I hope that our contact will be kept forever even if we all are living in different countries. I hang out with my American friends a lot to, they all are really nice and they love exchange students and to make fun of my accent but I don’t mind. I guess it would be funny to me too. I got used to speak fast in Polish and here people speak pretty slow, so some Americans have hard time understanding me due to that I speak fast and I still have my strong Polish accent.