Christmas break



On the 30th of November I had my name day and being so nice the Shepperd family hosted a birthday party for their daughter, Julia, and also for my name day! Joy was so nice to prepare my favorite food - lasagna. I even got a cake. After dinner, we had a ping pong tournament in the basement and had a lot of fun.


The last day of school before Christmas was Friday the 16th. I had about 20 free days. During this time we went hunting a few times with Big. You see, hunting is big here in Arkansas (pun intended). Especially duck hunting. The way it works is that there is a season when you are allowed to hunt. It lasts from late November till late January. We woke up early in the morning at around 5 and drove to the duck blind. After arriving at the parking you have to get out with all your guns and ammunition and hop on a boat that takes you there. So you find yourself in the middle of a swamp surrounded by fake ducks that are motorized so they attract the real ones. It is illegal to start shooting earlier than 30 minutes before sunrise. But when the time comes there is no duck safe around us. The more experienced hunters have duck calls. They blow into them and it imitates the sounds of ducks. After calling them for a while some ducks do a fly-by to check if the pond is safe to land in and exactly at that moment we shoot. Yes, while they're still in the air. They either drop dead or land in the water usually crippled. We finish the ducks that are still alive and after there is a couple of them we go pick them up from the water on a kayak. During our stay in the duck blind, we eat breakfast and have fun. On my first ever day hunting I killed 3 ducks in total and thanks to Chris I know which one was the first one and I have pictures with it. The shotgun I was using was a 12 gauge. Thanks to my host dad Neall I learned a lot about weapons in general and thanks to big I learned how to use shotguns. I had a lot of fun, and now I understand why hunters consider it a hobby it is weirdly amusing.



Christmas was super relaxing, on the 24th we had dinner at the Merriman. There were quite a lot of people everyone brought something to eat, my favorite piece was the roast beef that Paul made :). That day we even made the traditional "loďky z vlašáků" (the walnut boat candles). And we displayed them at the dinner. We took some pictures said Merry Christmas to our dear friends and headed home. The next morning I woke up at around 7 with Deano screaming right in front of my door"ONDREJ WAKE UP WE HAVE PRESENTS TO OPEN!!!" I hurried into the living room where everyone was already and we started opening the presents. I got a lot of great presents from Santa, which I am truly grateful for, thank you. I also got my first-ever stocking since we don't have that at home. All in all, it was quite sad because it was my first ever Christmas without my family however, my host family did the best job to make it just as enjoyable as it would be back home. After we finished with the presents we all were pretty tired so for the rest of the day we just relaxed.


I also got to spend some time with another exchange student from Italy. I had dinner with Elena one day in Jonesboro and we also got to go to an NBA game in Memphis on the 8th of January. It was amazing seeing an NBA game with my own eyes. I even got to see the star of the Grizzlies Ja Morant, even when he wasn't playing.

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