Since arriving
on Monday July 8th, I have felt so happy again. Being in Up with People
is like a comfort to me now and I feel at home once again. The first week of
class flew by as I caught up with old friendships and made new ones. My host
family is wonderful and I love them to death, and same goes for my roommates.
My roommates include Brekken (she was in my cast last semester and is now a
staff member), Abbey (also in my cast last semester, but is helping teach dance
in staging) and lastly is Yazel (she is from Mexico and was a student a year
ago, but is now I am so happy and at home with them. We have done some really
fun things in the last two weeks such as a pool day with the family, movie
nights, delicious family dinners and stories, a very cool prayer sort of thing
before dinner (they are Jewish/Christian), a day at the water park, and a fun
night at the a Colorado Rockies baseball game, plus many little night time
outings to get a sweet treat.
In UWP we have begun the process of
staging and meeting and becoming a new cast. Cast B 2013. Arrival day was
exciting and fun as usual, and as usual learning 100 new names proved to be
difficult. After just one week though I pretty much have them all down. We have
some really unique countries represented this semester such as Curacao and
South Africa! I have already begun to form friends once again from around the world
and I look forward to our next 5 months together. The energy of the group has a
great vibe and I cannot wait to see what we do as a cast!
As staging begins we all undertake
the pressure of learning the show as fast as possible, learning about one another
and learning the ins and outs of UWP. As second semesters we already know a lot
of this so we have some separate workshops where we talk about how we can
support each other, the cast and our staff members, as well as take our
experience and knowledge from last semester and apply it to our life and this
semester.
In
the past two weeks we have done a whole lot of stuff. As study abroad students
we got to go on regional learning, which included taking a nice hike in the
mountains and touring the “Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory”, but things were
super interesting and it was nice to get away from studying for a bit and be
able to bond as we got to know the Denver area as well. We also did a CI on our
last day together before the rest of the cast arrived which we enjoyed
thoroughly and got a ton of work done. We are a great team.
The
next week when the cast arrived we things of course picked up quite a bit. As
second semesters we were able to participate in performing in the Opening
Session (sort of like a mini show) and that was crazy fun! The first week with
the cast consisted of icebreaker workshops, getting to know each other and the
program and plowing through learning the music and dances in the show. All in
all it was less stressful this time around, but the challenge a lot of us
second semesters faced was the feeling of needing to let go of last cast and open
up to the new one. A lot of adapting and pushing out of our comfort zones!
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