Laughter, funny moments, and randomness

It is hard to believe we are almost half-way done with our tour. In less then two weeks we begin our European tour starting with Milan, Italy. Its unreal how fast the time has gone, so I thought I'd share a couple of funny moments from the shows. As everyone knows, no show is ever perfect, but we get as close as we can. One of my fellow castmates, Sophie, who is from China, is an MC for the show, and once during her MC said "hi my name is China and I come from Sophie." It was a definately a blog moment. Another such moment came when Cassidy, from Denver, CO said, "Hi my name is Cassidy, and I am from right here in Denver CO" when it wasn't Colorado at all. These and countless other funny moments are what make this cast so special and memorable. I love the random conversations and the intense dialogues that occur. I know I mentioned this in a previous blog but I'll say it again; I have grown more in the last two months then in my entire life combined, and yet there is still so much more growing I have yet to do. The learning never ends here with Up With People. Its astonishing.

It has been brought to my attention that I have not explained how cities work and how we get from one city to the next. well my friends...allow me to enlighten you... We travel by tour bus from city to city with 60 of us crammed in to a bus with one tiny bathroom. We ocupy our time by sleeping, chatting, listening to music, watching movies, and more sleeping. Bus rides are an experience in themselves. Once we arrive at a city we have a city meeting and learn a little about the city. After that we meet our host families for the time we are staying in that city and go home with them to settle in. During our stay in each city, we do community service and perform our show (among other things depending on the city). We learn a lot from our host families and get totaly emersed in the culture of that city. We also usually work in local schools with a diversity and awareness program targeted at middle schoolers. The program is called Stand For Peace.

Eureka was good if only for a few days. We arrived on Monday and left Thursday. then we went back to Oregon and headed to Coos Bay. Both cities were quick and busy with a double show day in Coos Bay plus a Mini Show in the morning. In Coos Bay we were at the Egyptian theatre, which is something like 80 years old and completely fabulous. It was beautiful, and I had a fun host family (as all of them are). Right now we are in Portland, Oregon. It is a fantastic city full of awesome sights and people. my host family is awesome as usual and took us out for a great pizza dinner last night. We have the rest of the week though so I am excited to see what else is in store for us. I love Portland and feel very at home here, and the weather has been awesome! lots of great food and entertainment. Tomorrow is a community service day and we are working with a homeless shelter. It should be pretty interesting. Also this whole wee is environmental week. So today we watched "An Inconvienent Truth" and talked about reducing, reusing and recycling. So until thursday we have to carry a trash bag with us and collect every piece of waste that we create; water bottles, cans, wrappers, left over food we wasted, etc. then we are going to compare everything on Thursday. We have to carry our trash with us all day everyday everywhere we go. Its going to really be a good teaching tool. America is the number one producer of waste - I didn't know that until today. I knew we were bad, but I didn't know we were the worst. Its going to be good to learn more environmentally friendly methods of doing things.