I know that I've started almost every blog post with apologizing for a late entry, and this entry was really overdue. I was too busy to regularly update my blog last semester and once I had some time to write on it there would be too much stuff to mention to be able to get through it all. My winter break finally gave me time to do another one.
As some of you know, my birthday is in August so only a couple of weeks after returning to Arizona and finally adjusting to the heat, the timezone and being in school again, I had my 17th birthday, with a birthday party. There's a pool at another church building close by that we can rent for any parties or events, so I rented it for the Saturday after my birthday which was during the week.
Here I'm opening some of my presents. My friends like to make fun of legos because they're Danish, so I got a set of legos for my birthday, among other things.
It was all lots of fun with a great group of friends. We threw some hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill for dinner.
By far the coolest present that I got was a pair of swim trunks (Some of the shorts I wear are considered swim trunks in the U.S., so I get a lot of jokes for that too. It's part of my identity if you ask people). A few of my friends got together and bought this pair of swim trunks and brought markers to the party for everyone to write little messages on there for me, along with 17 things they would always remember me for! It was super cool.
The following Friday was our first football game of the 2012 season for our varsity team, which I was now part of. I had resumed practices a few days after landing back in Arizona, and practices at this point in the season had gotten intense. Even when school started, we still practiced for 3-4 hours a day sometimes, although we'd get out after just 2 hours if we were lucky. Remember, this is in 100F/40C degree heat. One problem for me was this during this semester I had to take what is called a Z-hour at Westwood. An A-hour is an extra class in the morning, Z-hour is an extra class in the afternoon, so I had classes until 4 pm instead of the regular 3 pm. On some days, practices would start right after school, so during the time that I had my extra class. Being late for practices was not popular with the coach and as a result I only got playing time on special teams, although I was close to entering games several times.
I'm trying to cover a punt against Corona Del Sol High School's Aztecs.
Coming off the field after being on kick return against the Red Mountain High School Lions.
Later on in the season we played some of the top teams in state and started suffering some bad losses, especially against such schools as Red Mountain, Brophy and #1-ranked Mountain Pointe. During the game at Brophy, a private, Christian high school, I was actually substituted in with 10 seconds left of the game when our quarterback got sacked and had to be carted off the field with a neck injury that later proved to not be anything serious. Another receiver was about to replace him as quarterback, leading the way for me to enter the game but the referees decided to simply end the game because there was a 30-minute break while we had to wait for an ambulance to assist our starting quarterback, at which point it made no sense to play just another play or two. Our game against the then-number one team in state, Mountain Pointe, was ugly but it was our Senior Night, the last game of the season. More on that later.
A couple of weeks later, in September, a good friend of mine, Justin, invited me to go to the Arizona State University - University of Utah football game. Being a big fan of college football, I of course went.
Tailgating with some Utah Utes fans that my friend Justin's dad knew.
A look at the section of Sun Devils Stadium that had all the Utes fans. The guy in the foreground wearing a red cap is Justin.
Utah Utes players during their warm-up.
Utah's cheerleaders.
ASU Sun Devils running onto the field.
Players meeting and greeting each other after the game was over. It all got ugly very fast for Utah who were dominated all game by ASU.
Final score: 37-7 ASU.
Now that we are on the topic of colleges, during the fall I began applications to several schools in the US. It is January as I'm writing this, and I'm still undecided about whether or not I want to attend college in the States. I have applied to see if any opportunities come up, but if I don't get most of the expensive tuition at American schools covered by scholarships, I'm going back to Denmark. At this point, I don't know if that's the case. I am committed to majoring in Air Traffic Control because aviation has always been a big interest for me, so I want to direct air traffic for a living, hopefully at a major airport somewhere. If I want to become employed in America I need to have a U.S. citizenship, so I would have to do my training in the US to even be able to apply for that.
I have currently applied to Arizona State University (the local university who won the football game I just mentioned), where I have already been accepted, and I'm going to apply to Florida Tech, Purdue University and the Metropolitan State University of Denver. Not that many schools offer Air Traffic Control as a major and even fewer schools will let me apply without taking an English profiency test called TOEFL. It's 200$. Too expensive.
The very following Saturday was our homecoming dance. It is custom to go in groups for school dances, and do a so-called "day activity". Our activity before going to the dance later was bowling.
As you can tell, I was winning! Haha this was earlier in a frame, my friend Ben dominated all of us.
After bowling we all got dressed and went for pictures and dinner at Olive Garden before heading to the dance.
Trying my best to do a Heisman pose. (The Heisman Trophy is the college football award awarded to the best player in the country)
Our homecoming group. My date's name is Racquelle. She is the girl in the blue dress. We dated for a little while.
After a few more weeks of being super busy with school and sports, our football season was (finally) coming to an end. I say finally because although I really love playing football, it was very demanding to do 3-4 hours of practice along with IB classes. There were days when I would not get home until 7-8, maybe even 9 pm. Before I had showered and had dinner, I would be super tired, but then I would have at least a couple of hours of homework to do. I rarely went to bed before midnight, and slept during classes all the time.
Before our game against #1-ranked Mountain Pointe, we had our Senior Night activities, where all the seniors, not just on the football team but also among the cheerleaders and marching band members, were celebrated. The parents of the football players were given matching jerseys. Here's my host dad, Gunn and I:
We lost the game 63-2. Mountain Pointe, along with the other top-ranked teams in Arizona, have several players who will go on to play college football in Division 1. It is not unlikely that one or two of the players that we faced from some of the top schools may even get a chance to play in the NFL. It would be pretty cool to have played against somebody who got a chance to make it that far, but with such great competition comes some very one-sided games. The underclassmen who are committed to playing football for next year only got one week off before it was back to practices and lifting weights. Glad I'm done with all that so that I can now focus on school and spending time with a great group of friends.
The following week, in late October, was Halloween. What is really cool for Halloween is the fact that the school lets us wear our outfits to school as long as they aren't inappropriate. Here's one of my best friends, Austin and I:
Austin did a mix of fitness and Mitt Romney (this was not long before the American election in which Obama was re-elected, defeating Republican candidate Mitt Romney), calling himself Fit Romney. He's had a 5-point plan for saving America and your health. I still had my pimp custome, which never gets old. Wearing that to school was awesome with all the compliments and comments I got.
For IB seniors anywhere, an important part of the curriculum is the so-called Group 4 project. Group 4 is the group of the IB curriculum that contains the natural sciences. So all the physics, biology and chemistry students combined for an early November trip to the Phon D. Sutton part of the Arizona Salt River, which is the traditional go-to location for Westwood's IB students, to collect data from the river and any animals and insects that could be caught. It was a very fun trip.
Austin is a crazy person. We were having fun with the camera once we got to the Phon D. Sutton place and got off the bus. Gotta give him probs for wearing a cool sweater too.
All of us walking down to the river. It was most of the seniors and a few of the juniors, who are only doing a standard level, one-year science class. They won't have a science class during their senior year, so they joined us for the Group 4 project.
Part of Phon D. Sutton.
We were all put in groups, and so this is our group. Yeah, I'm the only guy.
Some of our teachers and IB administrators joined us, but they weren't doing any work, instead just enjoying a nice day in the sun. This is IB counselor Mrs. Rangel and IB coordinator Mr. Davis.
Our group at work.
For much of the data gathering and experimenting, we had to get into the river itself. I almost sprained an ankle while walking around the big rock in the middle.
The Salt River and the area around it is very beautiful.
A somewhat simple but effective way of measuring the flow rate of the water was standing one meter (the Americans use the metric system for science, thankfully) from each other and timing how fast an orange would flow from one person to the other.
Not all of our methods were that primitive, for some of the data gathering we used some pretty high-tech equipment.
We were having a bit of slightly immature fun as well.
That's a leech. Luckily for my friend Nitin, it didn't bite him. He tried to make it do that though!
Austin enjoying his lunch. He's not actually eating mayonnaise, even though he put the thing in a jar of mayo. Not even sure what that is.
Group photo!
When we got back from the river we all packed the equipment and discussed our data in our groups. Oh, and had fun too of course.
It was an awesome day.
As those of you who follow my blog probably know, I'm a member of Westwood's Model United Nations club, and I still am. We had our first conference of the year in early December, at ASU.
Group photo. This was actually taken in the morning before the 2nd day of conference.
A few funnies as well.
Mr. Buck, our Model UN advisor at Westwood, and my history teacher.
Myself and my good friends Austin, David and Nitin ready to get started with the conference.
And, as always, we love having fun.
Eating dinner at ASU's student cafeteria. It was delicious, and it's a buffet, so it was perfect.
During our meetings. I was in the General Assembly, representing the Netherlands.
During a caucus, talking to some of the other delegates.
At the conference I made a bunch of new friends, particularly from nearby Mountain View high school. As you can tell, most of them were girls. American girls seem to like foreign boys, which only works out to my advantage. I'm certainly not complaining.
Around the same time as our Model UN conference, a rather remarkable event occurred at Westwood. Two boys got into a fight and were punished by being given the choice of either taking a 9-day suspension, which would make them lose credit for their classes so they would have to retake all of them, or hold hands for more than an hour in the courtyard while being humiliated by anyone walking by. The boys agreed to do the latter, and were subject to a lot of humiliation. I saw a big group of kids outside of the door to my math class, and I went over to see what was going on. Our school principal, Dr. Richards, came up with the punishment but received heavy criticism for it. This is what caused the criticism:
After all the criticism, the story spread throughout the United States in newsmedia and even made it as far as the Daily Mail's website in the United Kingdom! I'm not kidding, Westwood was mentioned in an online article in a British newspaper! One of my friends, Elizabeth, arranged a rally for the following Monday during one of our mid-day breaks, where everyone would hold hands to show support for Dr. Richards, because most of Westwood's students felt that the punishment was effective and should not elicit critique.
Everyone holding hands in front of one of the fences at the edge of campus, with several local TV-stations having their cameras outside on the sidewalk. Some students had alerted local media about the event.
One of three news helicopters that were circling above campus during our rally.
And of course, lots of police showed up to make sure that nothing violent occurred. It was a very peaceful event. Here's a link to Phoenix CBS channel 5's article: http://www.kpho.com/story/20246896/students-hold-hands-to-show-support-for-mesa-principal
It was certainly a great mark on Warrior history. It felt amazing to be part of it all.
During the month of December was our Winter Formal dance. Winter Formal is a so-called girl's choice dance, where the girls ask out the guys that they want to go with. I did not expect to get asked because no one had done so until just over a week and a half before the dance, when a friend of mine, Sierra, asked me to the dance:
The weekend right after she asked me we all did our Winter Formal day activity, although the dance wasn't until the week after. Coincidentally, I had to still do a cultural activity for my Spanish class, our teacher assigns us to do something outside of class related to Hispanic culture. On the same day, there was a Tamale Festival in downtown Phoenix. Tamales are a special Mexican dish, meat usually mixed with vegetables and/or greens wrapped in some sort of leaves, and then cooked by steaming them in a special pot. So to start off the day, I got on the light rail and headed downtown:
They had some musical groups performing, which was pretty cool. What you see above is a group of Baile Folklórico dancers.
After spending an hour or two at the food festival, I took the light rail back to Tempe where I met up with most of our Winter Formal group for a boat parade at Tempe Town Lake.
There was a surprisingly large number of people at this parade (this is only a tiny section of a long stretch of people standing by the side of the river).
They had some pretty cool fireworks too.
After spending the earlier part of the night at Tempe Town Lake, we all headed over to the christmas lights at the Phoenix Zoo.
Those are flamengos. A few of the animals were out for the Zoo lights but most of them were asleep.
For some reason they had slides at the zoo. Don't ask me why. We had a good time.
Before talking about the dance itself, I want to mention the very unique event that happened during the week. December 12, 2012. We had class at 12:12:12, but that didn't prevent us from celebrating it.
12/12/12 @ 12:12:12
I made it the lock screen on my phone and took a screenshot at 12:12.
The mandatory fun was had.
The weekend after 12/12/12 was the weekend of our Winter Formal dance. When we wanted to get pictures, it was raining badly so we had to do them all inside. That rare moment that it rains in Arizona.
After taking pictures, we all went to one of the group members, Sarah's house, for dinner, instead of going to a restaurant which you usually do.
It was a great idea to do it at someone's house and everyone had a good time. Off to the dance we went and the whole night was nice. After the dance, Sierra and I, plus Sierra's good friend Kiana and her date Ryan went over to Sierra's house to watch a movie.
Now, it was time for the final week of school before our Winter Break. For Christmas, we all made small paper bags for everyone to put notes in, which would be read at a Christmas party that we held later in the week. Almost everyone signed up for a game of Secret Santa too.
In our Secret Santa game, I happened to be assigned to Nick, a classmate of mine. He's quarter Russian and loves history so I bought him a book titled Ivan's War, which describes the life of soldiers in the Red Army during World War II. Nitin, my secret Santa, gave me a camouflage snuggie. He wanted to give me fuzzy underwear so that I could stay warm in Denmark, but he couldn't find it anywhere.
Time for the holidays! For Christmas, we had a lot of family coming from out of town to visit us. Since the last blog post, my youngest host brother Caleb, returned from his Mormon mission in Colombia. A friend of his, Kade, came back from his mission almost at the same time as Caleb, but all his family except a sister and a brother had moved to Northern Nevada. Kade wanted to stay in Mesa and we offered him to stay with us. He's super nice, and so is Caleb, and they're not too much older than me, both being 21 years old. For the holidays, the second oldest of my host brothers, James, and his wife Melanie as well as their kids Virginia and new-born Thomas were in town all the way from Wisconsin to visit us, as well as the family's oldest, their daughter Kirsten, who lives in North Carolina.
We're playing a game of cards. In the middle are some æbleskiver/apple beignets. I brought a special pan for those back from Denmark for Jana and she's used it a bunch of times. They're a delicious dessert. James is on the left and Caleb is on the right.
A very odd event happened before Christmas. Someone knocked on our door and ran away, leaving two goldfish at our doorstep. We have no idea who they're from, but somehow we ended up getting some goldfish for Christmas. We haven't kept them, we gave them away to Jana's sister, Carol, who lives in Mesa as well.
Time for Christmas and presents!
James opening presents with his kids, Thomas and Virginia.
Gunn getting a new pair of pants.
Melanie with Thomas.
Caleb with a cord that lets him plug his iPhone into a soundsystem to play music via the speakers. Too bad our sound system is actually too old for it to work!
Jana with the present that my parents and I gave the family, a set of bowls for serving.
For Christmas, I got an Occupy Wall Street t-shirt from my parents, a book on Getting Into College, a Foot Locker gift-card, a pillow-cover, money from some of my family members, as well as a chocolate advent-calendar from my neighbor back home. I used a bunch of the money on a ticket for the 2013 Fiesta Bowl. Let me give a big thank you to all of you who sent gifts! More on that later.
For New Year's, we were in Mesa and since the McKay doesn't celebrate New Year's with fireworks and everything like I'm used to, I was looking for somewhere to go to kick-off 2013. Two of my friends, Justiss and Elizabeth, were going to Mill Avenue in Tempe, a place known for it's bars, night clubs and parties.
There were a huge group of people on Mill Ave that night.
This kid was showing off some crazy dance moves.
The DJ that was playing music outside was not too good, sadly, but it was still a party.
The three of us.
Sadly, only a couple of days after New Year's Eve, my iPhone fell into the toilet by accident and was damaged. It has now been almost a week and I've had it turned off several times. I read online that a great trick is to dry the phone by putting it in a glass or bag full of rice. I did that for a day, took it out and it worked like normal! Even the screen was lit up, and I received text messages and calls like nothing had happened. That lasted for some hours before the screen started flickering and went dark all of a sudden. I cannot see anything on my phone without a light, and the lock button does not work on it, as well as the volume buttons being weird. My phone spontaneously turns the volume all the way up without me even touching it, which is very annoying when I'm listening to music. I'm probably gonna get a new iPhone 5, but I put the phone back in the glass full of rice to give it one last shot at drying.
It's in there somewhere.
Now, to the last event that I'm going to cover in this blog entry, the 2013 Fiesta Bowl! For those of you who don't know, college football has so many teams that although the #1 and #2 teams play for the national championship game, the rest of the teams play in so-called bowl games, that can be considered a sort-of final. The Fiesta Bowl, which is played every year in nearby Glendale, Arizona is one of the biggest bowl games next to the national championship. This year, the 4th ranked University of Oregon Ducks came to play the 5th ranked Kansas State University Wildcats. There was never any doubt that I was going, although I tried to invite some of my hostfamily, especially Caleb and Kade, but neither of them could afford the tickets, which were expensive. They sold out quick, so I had to get my ticket on a fan-to-fan ticket sales website.
Since I was going by myself, I had to figure out a method of transportation. I found a company that arranges chartered busses to big sports event, and they had a bus leaving from nearby Tempe to go to the game. I got my ticket and a seat on the bus, and off I went.
Even the ticket itself is pretty cool.
The view of the University of Phoenix Stadium from the bus. This is the home field of the Arizona Cardinals.
I enjoyed some nice seafood before the game in a nearby restaurant.
Oregon Ducks players warming up.
Kansas State Wildcats players warming up on the other end of the field.
A view of the stadium from the inside, from my seat (which was in the very first row of the upper level, in the so-called Ring of Honor. Great spot).
The Fiesta Bowl is sponsored by Tostitos, a brand that produces chips and salsa.
The man in the white visor is Oregon's coach, Chip Kelly. It has been rumored that he might be coaching in the NFL next year.
Oregon's marching band.
Kansas State's marching band spelling out "KSU". It's upside down because I was sitting on the Oregon sideline. But I was actually rooting for KSU in this game.
"K-State".
"Wildcats"
"Big XII", Kansas State is part of the Big 12 athletic conference.
Oregon's marching band spelling out "Ducks".
WTD - Win The Day. Coach Chip Kelly's motto for his team.
The unfurling of Stars and Stripes before the national anthem.
Oregon's kick returner, #6 De'Anthony Thomas, perhaps the fastest player in college football, ran back the opening kickoff for a touchdown. Oregon dominated for most of the game, especially during the second half.
Kansas State on offense, with quarterback #7 Collin Klein ready to take the snap. He's gonna play quarterback in the NFL next year, after leading Kansas State to a season where they were one loss away from a chance to play for the national championship.
K-State flag runners after a Wildcats touchdown.
A replay on the stadium's big screen.
Oregon scored another touchdown.
A replay of Oregon defensive back Erick Dargan's interception of Collin Klein.
Players meeting at midfield after the game. Oregon won 35-17.
The Oregon Duck, their mascot, playing around with Tostitos chips, symbolic for their victory.
Oregon's offensive player of the game, quarterback #8 Marcus Mariota, and defensive player of the game, linebacker #46 Michael Clay
A reporter from ESPN, Reece Davis, alongside Coach Chip Kelly. ESPN is the main sports TV-network in the US.
This is right after the trophy ceremony concluded.
That's it for now! I'm glad I finally got to update my blog. As I have always said at the end of blog entries, hopefully there won't be as much of a wait before I can post something on here again. Today is Sunday night (it's technically Monday, it's past midnight) and I'm gonna resume school tomorrow after our winter break.
Of other exciting news that are coming up is the fact that I will be getting my driver's license in around 4 weeks, and at the end of February we are preparing for our international Model UN trip. This year we're going to Italy.
Until next time, take care.
Thomas.
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