Des Moines, Muscatine, Burlington

This is Des Moines!Here are my friends Chris and Sandra and I working with an organization called Kids Against Hunger. We totally rocked the hairnets as we packed food to send to kids in Kenya and Haiti. It was a fun, fun time. We packed over 250,000 food packets in one day!
Is this not one of the coolest libraries ever? It's the Law Library at the Iowa State Capital Building. Beautimous! Aimee, my roommate, and I got a sweet tour since our host mom was a tour guide at the Capital.
A few of us went to a Hy-Vee (super common grocery store in Iowa) to bag groceries, talk to people about our show and paint kids faces. These black spongey things were supposed to somehow aid us in the painting process. Instead, they aided Leo, Johanna and me in being totally awesome.
So, this Irish dude, Ultan, who is totally crazy, carries a faux blonde mullet with him. So on this certain day almost the entire cast tried it on. Personally, I think I looked the coolest. Vincent from Belgium and Oscar from Sweden helped me pull off this majestic picture.

Oh where to start...

Our show in Muscatine two nights ago was AMAZING. It was at the Muscatine High School (yes I said THE Muscatine High School) and was not only sold out, but over sold by 58 tickets. Bad, yes, but in a very good way. The auditorium was PACKED. It was the first show I experienced the glow of cell phones waiving back and forth as I sang. So cool!

We arrived in Burlington Wisconsin today, and I'm already in love with the city. The old, brick buildings that make up the downtown area are so cute! There are two coffee shops that AREN'T Starbucks within walking distance of our home base, which is sweet. I've been elected to the Coffee Committee and have named myself Coffee Consultant. As such, it is my job to find the best coffee places in every town we go to and to inform the cast where the shops are. The interview process was quite intense. I was asked questions such as, "is your favorite color brown?" and, "would you drink a cup of coffee even if it tasted terrible?" I was competing along with three other people for the position. Obviously the committee wanted someone very experienced and passionate about coffee.

Our show here will be in the high school gym and I'm not sure how that's going to work stage-wise... But we've already sold 800 out of 1200 tickets! It's crazy how excited I am about everything, all the time...

It's so amazing to me how nice host families are. They open their homes, washing machines, computers, and, most importantly, refrigerators to us and ask nothing in return. How cool is that?? I hope I can host someday and pass on the kindness to Up with People students of the future.

Love to everyone!

-Marina out

Lincoln, Mquoketa, and now... De Moines!

Sitting in the back of my Denver host family's van before we left on Feb 10. Our buses! Ernie and Burt. Yes, I named them. I love both our bus drivers, one's named Marv (I assume that is short for Marvin) and the other is Stan. They are both awesome!
This is my songwriting/being crazy weird friend Molly. We like fruit.
This is Kristian from Denmark. He wore this crazy headgear all day on Valentine's day. I wish I had the picture of him sleeping open-mouthed with these one... as my Irish friend Ultan would say, "'Mazin!"
Backstage opening night at the Buell:

So I have really good excuses for not writing for so long. Mainly, not enough time (story of my life) and the lack of internet at the last host house. So, I do apologize; I hope no one thought I'd died or anything tragic like that.

The first bus day was awesome. I love road trips and the bus was one giant party. Travel days are really the closest things we get to days off. Even our days off in cities are taken up with host family activites, which is great, but we don't get a ton of time to do absolutely nothing. We arrived in Lincoln that night and got picked up by our second host families of the semester. I stayed with an awesome girl named Brooke, and her Aunt was our host. We were only there for three nights, but the whole family made us feel right at home. We did our first Stand for Peace project in middle and elementary schools in Lincoln. IT was so cool to work with two different classes for two hours. We played games and did activities that helped them recognize and appreciate the diversity within their classrooms and in the world. Super cool! We ate lunch with the first group and I felt really awesome when one eleven year old girl rushed up to give me a hug before we left.

The show in Lincoln was fun because it was at the University, so it felt like I was in college (yay college) for a day. During breaks some of us walked around campus drinking coffee adn handing out flyers for the show asking students whether they'd been "flyered" yet. We had a fairly large crowd and it was great fun.

We left the next day for a tiny town called Mquoketa in Iowa. It was snowing when we arrived at the hotel where our host families were to pick us up and all I could see was the glowing, blue, Walmart sign across the street. "Welcome to Mquoketa," I thought. It turned out that I really loved the town a lot. It's one main street runs through old, two-story, brick buildings and lovely victorian style houses. My host was a 26 year old girl named Sarah who lived in a cute, little apartment downtown. She and her cat, Toby, made me feel right at home.

The next day we spent doing community impact (CI) at various places. A group of about twenty others and I helped move some stuff to the new Mquoketa Historical Society building. It was physically hard work, but we had so much fun! All of the other volunteers were much older and seemed to enjoy our young energy. We also took tons of pictures with our newest "cast member" "A." A is a stuffed bear that Beth and Brittany (cast mates of mine) made at Build a Bear. He has a guitar and a hard hat and is super cute. I tried to upload some pictures of him, but my camera stopped working. I'll make sure to add some next time. We also wrote a song about A and played it for the cast that morning.

The next day was show day, and very very snowy. We were all worried that no one would come because of the weather, but we actually sold a lot more tickets than expected. The house was probably close to 3/4 full, which is amazing considering the circumstances.

Today we set out, yet again, and arrived in Des Moines Iowa after what was supposed to be a 3 hour bus ride turned into an 8 hour one. We watched a fabulous, Irish movie called Once, which I highly reccomend.

My host family here is an older couple who seem very nice. I'm so excited to be traveling and learning so much about the world! Wooo!

Love to all,

Marina

P.S. Sorry for all the typos and missing words, I don't proof-read mostly, so it's a bit messy.

First show!!!

I'm dead tired. I'ts 2:10 AM on Sunday, technically the day after the premier Up with People show at the Buell Theater in Denver. 2,000 plus people filled the theater (pictured above). I was amazed at how I was not the slightest bit nervous throughout the show, even though I had to stand on stage b myself twice throughout the show. Everyone seemed to love the show and we got a standing ovation afterwards.

The best part for me, happened after the show. I was talking with my ecstatic host sister out in the crowded lobby when Jessica, one of the staff, pulled me away and said, "I have something to show you." She took me back into the theater and pointed to a few ailes down and said, "Pink sweater." I had no clue what she was talkign about until my eyes fastened on a terribly familiar fuzzy pink sweater and I realized who it was. I screamed, burst through the small crowd of people still milling at the top of the stairs and nearly bowled my mom over as I threw my arms around her. I , laughed, cried some more and hyperventilated a bit before I even choked out a "hello." Come to think of it, I'm not sure I really said hello at all. I suppose after one cries as I did, with avalanches of makeup rolling down my cheeks and great, hi coughing gasps for air, "hello" would sound a tad cliche. I had to stay conduct an interview of a possible future "uppy" (an Up with People cast member) but, at 11:30, Mom and I went out to a 24 hour diner in Denver where I mainly stared at her in awe of her being there and tried to make conversation, but my brain hardly cooperated.

We leave Denver on Monday, bright and early at 7:30. I'm half looking forward to and half dreading the 9 hour bus ride to Lincoln Nebraska. We've been here for so long it seems and I'm ready to get out on the road. But, I'm going to miss my host family here very much. I feel like Denver is yet another place I can call home, so it's hard to leave it, not knowing when I'll return.

Bed time.

Love to all,
Marina

Show in One Week!

From top to bottom:
We had an Ethiopian/Italian dinner two weeks ago at our house and invited a few families from the area over. We played Apples to Apples, ate way too much, and danced like crazy.

This was our first Community Impact day. I got to put up drywall at a Habitat for Humanity house. It was awesome!




The past week was stuffed with rehearsals for our show next Saturday. I will most likely be in an awesome Salsa dance called Oye el Boom, but who knows 'cause they change the lists all the time. Just to give you an idea of the craziness, here's a typical day from the last week (including today, SATURDAY): I wake up at 6:30, ride the bus to Denver from 7:27 until 7:56, walk a mile to the Sherman Center, have morning meeting from 8:30-9, have dance or vocal workshops from 9-12, lunch, 1-5:10 run the entire show. CRAZINESS! It's all good though, because I have two vocal/guitar solos! One is called Shine the Light and the other is I Can Believe. I have to admit that before coming to UP with People I was a bit worried about the music. From the recordings they had online, most everything sounded cheesy, and I wasn't sure how I was going to deal with singing sappy songs about world peace and happy unicorns and rainbows and fluffity fluff fluff... Somehow, I've actually come to really believe in the songs. There seems to be a fine line between cheesy and genuine. I think that the UP with People songs could easily be cheesy if they weren't sung with real passion and intensity.

The show is super cool, which I am glad for. It'd kinda suck if I had to perform a crap show for the next five months. We keep hearing rumors that the Buel (I think that's the correct spelling...) Theater, the theater our show will be in, is almost sold out for Saturday! It holds 3,000! I can't wait to perform for so many people. It's so cool to me how one person can be on stage touching and inspiring thousands of people all at once. I get to be that person! wooooo!

We got fliers today to hand out to people and my roommate Meraf and I were looking at them saying, "I can't believe we're actually IN it!" I remembered the first time I saw UP with People when I was about eight at the Fox and how exciting and awesome it was. I can hardly fathom that I am now one of those cool people who get to inspire eight year olds... I feel so privileged.

So far, UP with People has far surpassed any expectations I had, which weren't many because I really had little idea of what to expect.

On a completely different note, yesterday, I voted for the very first time!!! I managed to get my absentee ballot sent here and this morning as I slipped the yellow envelope into the mailbox and flipped up the red flag, I felt super grown up and awesome. Yay voting!

I hope to post again tomorrow. We're going bowling with a few other families and I'm going to take lots of pictures.



Cheers!

-Marina