Our guest writer, Marek Borik, is an exchange student this year from Slovakia…

I have always loved travelling and my host family knows that. They usually go on a holiday during the Christmas break. And because they want my experience in here to be the best possible, they took me to Florida for a vacation.

We were staying at Daytona Beach in a wonderful apartment with a narrow view of the sea. None of us is the type of person whose passion would be to lay on the beach the whole day; we were doing many activities to keep us occupied. Because Orlando is somewhat close to Daytona, we made a trip to Epcot Park (in Disney World) with, in my opinion, crazily overpriced tickets. I have never been to a park of this kind before and I was astounded by its size, opportunities and the amount of people there. The wait time for a ride could be as long as two hours. That’s why we did only two rides, which I really enjoyed and then we were walking for the rest of the time.

I have to admit, Daytona’s sandy beach was beautiful, we were walking on it almost every day. And for this season there were surprisingly many people. We were staying there during both Christmas Day and Christmas Eve and my brain was really confused, because this has always been the time when the cold winter started to show itself, so swimming in the warm Atlantic Ocean was very strange, but nonetheless pleasing.

Overall this has been one of the best Christmas presents for me in my entire life. Apart from crappy wi-fi in the hotel, every aspect of this holiday simply amazing and I cannot thank my host family enough for taking me with them and showing me yet another part of the United States. I can only hope that more opportunities like this will arise in the future, so I can explore as much as I possibly can.