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.
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