Recount of my Summer Vacation (not finished)

This summer vacation was the first one while being at YIS. Back when I lived in Germany, we used to go to Japan every summer. Since we now live in Japan there was no need staying here so I decided to go to Germany to visit my friends. Also my plan for the summer vacation was to go to Finland (as we did every year) and then to attend numerous hockey camps in Japan.

My first destination this summer was Germany. Although I wasn’t born there, it was kind of my home because I lived there for 12 years. I was definitely looking for to that trip. While I was in Germany, the European Football Championship (Euro Cup) was going on in the neighboring countries Austria and Switzerland. Since my friends and I were quite soccer mad it was great that there were big screens set up in parts of the city so at night you could go out and watch the games live with lots of other fans. Germany made it all the way to the finals but then unfortunately lost to Spain. The highlight of my visit there was probably attending the last day of my school. It was great meeting all my old friends again and also making lots of new friends. While I was there, I really realized how much I missed that place.

While in the recent years when my family and I went to Finland, we usually went straight to our summer house and spent two or three weeks there. This year however, I was planning to go to a hockey/confirmation school. I was VERY nervous. The reason for this: I never really interacted with other Finnish teenagers before. I was glad that in the end there was nothing I had to worry about because everybody was really cool. I also made lots of friends with whom I still keep in contact via MSN or Facebook. I took this as a valuable learning experience. After the confirmation camp it was nice when my family and I were at our summer house. It had been two whole years since we were there last. Last year it wasn’t possible to go there due to the hectic move to Japan. I enjoyed one and a half weeks filled with the Finnish nature. 

I came back to Japan about four weeks before school started. I had a mission in front of me: To attend 5 hockey camps in 4 weeks. The most important camp was in Kushiro (Hokkaido), which determined if I was going to make it into the U16 National Team. My first camp however was in Nagano. This camp was mainly to improve my skill and to get me back into ice hockey after playing almost no ice hockey for the whole summer. The second camp was to bring up my physical condition as I didn’t train that much during my time in Germany & Finland. The third camp was the one in Hokkaido. I thought I did quite well there and since i was competing with the countries’ best, I thought I proved that I can keep up with them. The final camp was in Aomori which was also quite physically demanding, if not the most demanding…

This is as far as I got with my recount so I am sorry that I could not share my other jolly good times that I had. Thank you for reading (:P)  I will try to finish my recount ASAP!!!!!!