Dear November...

Hi everyone!

Well, I've decided to start writing in English because it seems to be the best option to continue improving my English. It hasn't been such a long time since I write here but since we have more of a week to stay at home thanks to Thanksgiving Break, I have a lot of free time.

There's a lot of things I would like to talk about, these weeks have been crazier than ever, and looking back, that's difficult.

In my last post I talked about Florida and the JEA/NSPA convention and all I have to say is that was whatever you can think in and more.

-Day 1: 

I woke up at 3:30 am and, after a quick breakfast and a last check of my suitcase, I waited until my friend Claire came with her mom to take me to the airport. The only thing I can say is that I couldn´t even think of how tired I was. However, after have passed all the controls in the airport, I´m becoming an expert in that, I was enough awake to be able to bother the boys during the fligth. 

We arrived in Orlando around 10 am and we continued our way to the hotel. After leaving all our suitcases and decide which bed was for each one, we went to the Walt Disney World Swam, one of the Disney hotels, where the conference took place.

There as soon as we arrived each one of us received a different bag according to our position on staff and well, just say that there were tons of univerities representing their campus there and that almost all of them had free staff for us. The result: a full ba of reporter notebooks, pens, stickers, flags, and my dear photojournlism book.

Newspaper crew

That afternoon we visited Downown Disney and we had dinner in Planet Hollywood.

-Day 2:

It was a conference day, each one of us chose the ones that seem interesting and that´s how we sent the morning. My choices were: Engaging viewers beyond social media, Covering the controversy, The art of photo editing and Photography and social media. 

That day in the afternoon we had our contests, each one of us participated representing our high school in one category, mine was Comentary Writing. It was a really interesting situation, is not easy to do it when your first language is English so imagine when it´s Spanish. But well, y feelings about my work were positive and that´s all it counts.

There was a turtle there

That´s Cheyenne´s pic, not mine.

As a celebration that night we went to have dinner in a "fancy restaurant" and I ate my irst fih in three months, as a plus we celebrate Cheyenne´s birthday.

We swam in the swimming pool of our hotel and well, we had some girls-boys funny disputes hahaha. It was so much fun!

-Day 3:

On Saturday morning we had more coonferences, mines were: Beginner Photoshop, 'How do I do...?' using InDesign, Oh, snap and Amazing Photography: tips veryone can use. That morning we went to the Award Ceremony where we received the critiques of our writings and the awards. My critique was more that I could have ever expected, I was so happy with it that I couldn´t think about anything else. They liked my work and that was the best I could have asked for. In the award ceremony Cheyenne, Erik and Elliot received awards for their works. Josh, Chase, Claire and I didn´t have the same luck, but, when you are participating for the first time as a high school and of the seven people we were, three received national awards... let´s just say that we didn´t really care.

In the afternoon the most expected part of our trip arrived, we went to Magic Kingdom!

I have tons and tons of pictures but these ones are already a lot so I think you´ll have enough. 

-Day 4:

On Sunday, we just went to the airport and spent there approximately 5 hours, but in those hours I found a Harry Potter Universal Studios shop and well, now I have a Gryffindor scarf, Gryffindor socks, a wand and a few more things that every Harry Potter fan deserves.

SNOW!!!

That´s what I saw in my weather app a few days ago, the excitement I had in that moment couldn´t have being bigger. And, against the predictiond of my host dad who said that it was not going to snow, it did!

Chess club continues, as well jingle flutes. I´m the new 1st flute and the christmas present that everybody should buy me is a picolo from now on. We are going to start with disections in anatomy after the break and next semester that would be almost all we are going to do.

Since Thanksgiving is tomorrow I´m not going to include it in this post, but I have to say that having food at school last week was pretty great.

School is going awesome and I don´t really have a lot to tell about that. My pep band rehersals will start in a week and I couldn´t be more excited about that.

I have to say that the convention in Florida and being in newspaper these months made me realize that maybe photojournalism is another career I could do instead of medicine, but medicine is still my 1. I don´t know, the future seems to be so far away right now but at the same time so close that I can nt even think about making a huge decision without being insecure. I guess America opened my eyes in a lot of aspects and my future doesn´t correspond with being in Spain anymore. I was tired of the life I had, I didn´t know it when I made the decision of coming here, but now, I know I was. Not in my friends or family life, no. I was tired of the Spanish thought, I was tired of being misunderstood when I was talking about hard work. America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, well, I guess America is my home now too.

I hope to see y'all soon!