My Holiday Season -Abroad!

Hi folks!

I had an awesome holiday season! I celebrated Christmas for the first time, it was my birthday, I had my first wrestling match, I went to Redmond for New Years and I did the polar bear plunge. 

Shopping Christmas presents is harder than I thought! Everyone got presents for everyone in my host family. My birthday is on the 25th so I got double presents :)

On the 27th was a wrestling tournament and I was finally cleared to wrestle again after my concussion (previous blog post). Unfortunately, I lost both matches but I was still happy because it was so much fun to be there and to be a part of this team. I didn’t do that bad in my first match. I got my opponent in a "head and arm" but the referee didn’t call it a pin. 

[VIDEO]

I had a bloody nose and got pinned after that but I hope I will do better next time. 

Jennifer who is an exchange student from Germany as well invited me to Redmond so we could celebrate New Years together. She and her host family came and picked me up on the 31st. We went to the mall and to Goodwill. After that, we baked pizza and played board games at their house. We stayed up till 12 am, had a little celebration and went to bed then. 

My host mom picked me up the next morning so we can go to the polar bear plunge. The polar bear plunge is a Scandinavian tradition where you jump into usually cold water on New Year's day to have a ‚clean‘ start. So we picked up a friend of mine and met with a bunch of friends at the beach. Everyone got ready and at noon we counted down and ran into the Puget Sound. It was really cold but fun. Really nice experience and recommended! 

My holiday season was amazing and I expect yours was too! Happy New Year! 

I hope my blog was interesting and informative for you! 

-Amin