Up with People Cast B 2010 On Tour

Torrin Tyler(New Zealand) at the Pensacola Zoo

Thursday march 12th was another busy day in all our busy days. Today we did community impact. Some of us went to the zoo to build a fence and picnic tables and some of us went to the Escambia Westgate School, a sensory school. I was one to go to the school. There we cleaned one of the special rooms. Every week we have a country representing his/her own culture, and this week was The Netherlands week. So all week we had been busy making our presentation for today!

Cast A09 fireproofed these materials for the Escambia Westgate School

Friday we had an other community impact day. Again, some of us went to the zoo, and the rest stayed at Woodham Middle School. There we did go into some classrooms and played some fun games with the kids. After a break, we had news time, that’s the time when we hear about things that happen in our countries, it’s like a half hour of news.

Saturday we had our show at Woodham Middle School. In the morning there were some dance workshops and we set up our stage. In the afternoon we rehearsed the show. After the show some of us had interviews, some of us were on strike, so they had to take down the stage. It was a very long day, cause host pick up was round 11.45, although it was a good day.

Sunday was our free day! I went to the international food store that they have in Pensacola, and got some awesome Dutch cookies! That made my day, I was totally happy.

Paquita Cornelissen, The Netherlands

Monday March 9th 2009

Community Impact at St. Michael's Cemetary in Pensacola, FL

Today was a very hard and emotional day for many of us. We had to leave our amazing host families from Dade City, Florida behind. Many of us were crying along with our host families. In such a short time they changed and impacted our lives and they definitely felt like a family away from home. You never realize how hard it is to say goodbye until you have to, which makes it even harder. “How lucky it is to have known someone that makes it so difficult to say goodbye to”. This quote definitely describes what we experienced leaving Dade City.

Around 8:30 we got on the bus and headed off to Pensacola, Florida. Yay! For a new adventure, new city, and new host family. It’s always exciting to go to a new place. It took us about 8 hrs. to get to Pensacola but we also made stops along the way for the restroom and breaks. Some of us slept, watched movies, looked outside at the scenery, listened to music, or talked along the way. When we arrived to Pensacola the staff and interns had their meetings and then we had our wrap up of the day. We met our host families and went our seperate ways.

Tuesday March 10th 2009

On Tuesday we were invited to the National Naval Aviation Museum. We had a guided tour through the museum which has airplanes from 1900 to the present. It was interesting to see all the different developments in aircraft history, a lot of them military aircraft.  After lunch, we went to Pensacola Beach to have a fun activity, the Hometeam Olympics. The whole cast is divided into seven smaller groups which we call “Hometeams”. Each of these groups is responsible to do minor tasks in each city. The Hometeam Olympics had four different activities.  First, We built a human pyramid. Second, we had a track-and-field-competition. Third, we had an eating competition and finally, we all made buildings out of sand. We all had a lot of fun and made some people curios about our group by all the activities we did. The last thing on Tuesday was a Jewish Purim party we all went to. As the Jewish tradition says, we all dressed up in costumes and had an interesting time at the synagogue celebrating Purim, because for most of us it was the first time participating in this celebration.

Community Impact at St. Michael's Cemetary in Pensacola, FL

Wednesday March 11th 2009
Today we started with our morning meeting talk about how the day was going to run. We got on the bus and went to St. Michael’s Cemetery. We did a lot of weeding getting Palmettos out near the graves since their roots can get very big and break the tombstones or get in to the burial site. We also cleaned up a lot of trash as well. Around 12:15 we headed to lunch and had a great lunch. We had a little bit of time to just relax. We went back to the cemetery to do last minute clean up and collect all trash. We took the bus back to our meeting area at the Armory here in Pensacola. We did an Education Workshop entitled Beliefs. It was such a great workshop and we were so fascinated to hear what everyone believed in or what they wrote down on a belief questionnaire. After the Belief workshop we had performance prep time. We did a nice warm up and stretches first and did dancing to our Mexican Medley. We had not practiced the dance for 3 weeks or so. What fun that was since a lot of us remember the dances and we also sang along to the dances. We then had wrap up and then got picked up for an evening with our host families.

-by Shannon McClellan(USA) and Gregor Pollehn(Germany)

March 8th, 2009

They always manage to keep us so busy! This week we weren’t traveling nearly as much, but we had 2 show days and 3 days of community impact. Thursday I had the chance to do my first Stand for Peace with Kady and Axel at Pasco Middle School. Each of the groups had an hour to present to a class of middle schoolers on diversity and peace. We play team building and diversity oriented games and the teachers usually love them because they can use them in the future. Afterwards we put on a small show for the whole middle school, which was pretty intense. It may have been our largest audience yet! They were so full of energy, they were certainly the loudest audience we’ve had so far! And even though the 8th graders acted like they were too cool for it, I know they loved it too. Our host sister goes to school there and our host mom teaches there, so it was really great that they got to see what we do in the community and it was a treat for our sister to see us on stage.

Friday was a show day, and show days are always big rehearsal days, so while half the group set up the stage the other half practiced things that needed to be cleaned up for the performance. My dad called me the night before the show and surprised me with the news that he would be there, so this show was pretty significant for me personally. I always enjoy performing, and it made it special because I was performing for someone I knew from my world back at home.

Axel Kremer(Belgium) explains the soundboard to fellow castmates

Saturday was our second show day this week, so we had a few extra hours in the morning to fill, and our awesome tech team taught us how all the cool tech stuff worked. We all got to play with the instruments and the lights, the lighting and sound boards and we went out to the truck to do a trust fall in our smaller groups. It was a morning well spent. The  show that evening went really well, and everyone kept the energy up after the show when we all did our respective jobs. Some of us broke down the stage and others did interviews and the assistants and interns helped their departments as well. Late nights are a part of life now, and we usually stay out to 11:45 on show days.

Anne, Anthoney, Rafael, Jessica, and Yui after landing safely

Host family days are Sundays, and this Sunday was particularly fun for me! A group of us, mostly staff and those students who found out and begged , chose to go sky diving outside of Orlando. So a lot of us had a milestone, we jumped out of a perfectly good airplane for the first time. I am really glad I got the chance to go. Back at home, Yan made us a typical Chinese dinner and it was amazing. I really enjoyed the day, it was almost like a day off, but not quite. Never a dull moment in UWP!

-by Jessica Schang, USA

Monday, March 2^nd

Regional Learning in Dade City

The cast arrived to Dade city after an awesome weekend in Orlando, where a lot of the cast members had the opportunity to visit the Disney parks and Universal Studios. Everyone was telling great stories during the first hour of the day while getting ready to hit the road. It was a short one and a half  hour ride. The weather was really chilly on our first day. We had some really nice words from our cast managers Jen Moody and Gabe Anchondo. The cast was able to talk about how we were feeling so far with the tour and reflect on the last weeks. After that we visited The Pioneer museum, we had an interesting guided tour where we got to see the process for obtaining sugar mill, an old citrus packing warehouse and a really interesting talk from a woodworker who seemed to love his job and was really passionate about sharing with us his knowledge.

We had a nice afternoon. We hung out around the museum for a while and enjoyed this really nice place. Afterwords we had the allocation meeting and we were all really excited about meeting our new host families and looking forward to new and cool experiences.

Tuesday and Wednesday, March 3^rd and 4^th

The next two days we had community impact service, where we separated into three different groups. The first group went to build some houses for an organization called Habitat for Humanity and some of our cast members met the CEO of this organization. The second group went to BethanyApartments and helped out with some painting and gardening and the last group went to the Dade City “Wild Things” zoo for helping out cleaning animal cages. I heard awesome comments from the three groups especially from the group that went to the zoo I saw some photos and videos of lions tigers and panthers and they even got to touch a baby tiger. It was hard work but at the end of the day we were all happy about what we did.

-By Alejandro Vargas, Mexico

Thursday February 26th:

Show day! We started our morning meeting directly in the St. Augustine amphitheatre. The theater was once again outdoors! The program for the morning was set up and workshops and after lunch we started our rehearsal. Then after dinner, the show started. The day ended with super strike and interviews and everybody went home at midnight very tired!

St. Augustine Amphitheatre

Friday Friday February 2th:

Travel Day!!! But not a normal travel day! The day started at a deaf and blind school. Most people did community service and went to classrooms. The others started practicing for our first BTS (backing track show). After lunch we had our BTS show in the deaf and blind school and it was amazing to perform for all this students. everything was very quick after the show. We had only about 30 minutes before catching the bus to Orlando. After the two hours drive and the arrival in Orlando we had a guest speaker. And then host pick up and first evening with our new hostfamilies…

Yewalashet Girmu meets her Orlando host mom

Saturday February 28th:

Showday again! The day started again with set up and workshops. After lunch we had the Alain Thiry, the new CEO for Up with People as a guestspeaker and we met Angel Cortes, the writer producer of three new songs from our show! We were all very excited to meet this two. After the rehersal and dinner the show started. Then strike and interviews.

Sunday March 1: Hostfamily day!!! Disney World, Universal Studios, M&M store, Sea World Park and a lot more!

-by Gianna Roos, Switzerland

Hit the road cast, and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more. Off to St. Augustine. Leaving our North Miami host families was really hard. We got so attached to them in just one week. But, our journey was continuing, so goodbyes had to be said. We left North Miami with excitement for the city ahead. The cast traveled in two different buses and we stopped twice on the road. We stopped in Daytona Beach at the mall for lunch. Driving by the Daytona Raceway was very exciting! The raceway is huge!

We arrived in the oldest city in the United States, unpacked the bus, and had the allocation meeting. Aafke and Michael are our Advance team members this week, it was so nice to get to see them again! What a good feeling to welcome back the advance team. Things seemed to be in good shape. Our host codes were all non-alcoholic drinks. As soon as families started to arrive the cast started to search. Some families made signs, others brought the ingredients, some actually made the drinks and once they found their student they let them drink their host code! Great idea! And we were off for our first night with our new family.

Tuesday was a great day of Regional Learning. We got to go on a trolley ride around St. Augustine and learn all about the history here. We passed the oldest school house in the United States and also learned a lot about a man by the last name of Flaggler. I learned that a lot of the buildings here were made of seawater, sand, and sea shells…when all that is mushed together it made a substance like concrete. The tour dropped us off at Ripley’s Believe it or Not where we toured the museum and learned all about crazy things! Flaggler College invited us to have lunch in their dining hall which was incredible. We sang our theme song “Up with People” for the students in the dining hall and then we went outside and set up some culture presentations on their lawn. This was a lot of fun. I think that it really interested the students because a lot of them were walking by and staring and eventually would come up to a table and ask what was going on. We were able to do a lot of promotion this way and gained a lot of interest from this event. We finished the day on Tuesday by having an education workshop on team work. We got into small teams and had to design a cradle for an egg. The cradle needed to keep the egg from breaking, and we were dropping the cradle four meters. They had us discuss and design, then they threw in a little loop. They handed us someone else’s design and we had to create their design by using their directions. Good workshop on teamwork and communication. WOW, Tuesday was really jammed packed of things!

Wednesday was a Community Impact Day. Our cast was spread throughout the town. We sent some people to Cedar Creek School where we got to know their students. They performed a few songs for us and then we went into different classrooms and played with them. Some of us had dance/band sign outs and worked on some show stuff. Another group of us went around town doing promotion for the show. And the last group went to St. John’s Council on Aging. What a nice place this was. It is a place where seniors can go and socialize. They serve lunch; they also do a program called “Meals on Wheels” where volunteers bring seniors that can’t get out of their homes hot meals. They have many different classes that the seniors can participate in, for example, computer classes and line dancing classes. The group that went there painted their dining hall, moved some furniture, cleaned up their parking lot, and even participated in their line dancing class!

St. Augustine has proved to be a well organized city and filled with many fun activities and so much to learn about.

-by Angie Pfleiderer, USA