Our outbound exchange student, Tori Johnson

Our outbound exchange student, Tori Johnson, is finishing up her school year in Latvia and, after a tour of Europe with other exchange students, she’ll be returning home to Marana! In her own words:  It's FINALLY warming up, and by warming up I mean the temperature will occasionally get up to 60 degrees, and it has still been snowing a few times this month (April). But the snow is finally over and flowers are starting to bloom, which is very exciting. Today the grass was noticeably greener and there were little green leaves on the trees!

Easter was at the beginning of this month, we got a four day weekend off of school. Latvia has a lot of different and interesting traditions. In the morning we got up and my little host brother searched for Easter eggs that the "Easter bunny" had left, and after that we dyed eggs. But we used onion peels to color the eggs, and tied ribbons around them to make patterns and such. The smell was horrible, but they turned out really cool. After they were cooled, we had a "strong egg" competition, where we had to try to crack each other's eggs without cracking your own. There were also more competitions with the eggs, like a sort of rolling-race thing. Afterwards we had to eat the eggs with salt, so we won't lie this year. Another tradition was that we had to go and swing on a swing, so that we wouldn't get bitten by mosquitoes in the summer. We ended the day with a delicious Easter dinner.

I just got back from a trip I took with my host mom. We drove to Holland! It was amazing! We walked around Amsterdam at night, and I now know why they call it the city of bikes. There were probably more bikes than people! The next day we went to a big flower festival, there were fields of thousands of flowers. It may sound not very interesting, but it was amazing to see fields literally covered in reds and pinks, yellows and blues.