First and Second Day

These past two days have been a blur just crazy stuff is going on. We woke up on Monday thinking we would walk to our bus stop and it was snowing, probably around three inches already. Thank God for our host dad who very willingly gave us a ride to the bus stop. Now for my first day of public transportation ever this was not a very good experience. The free way was really icy so the bus was sliding all over the place. What should have been a thirty minute ride turned out to last about an hour. When we finally arrived we caught the free shuttle bus on the 16th street mall. This is a really cool part of downtown, only foot traffic and shuttle buses are allowed. Zola, my roommate from Ethiopia if you forgot, had to walk about three blocks to our building, when we arrived several staff members were waiting there. They told us that we, along with about twenty other students, were the only ones to have arrived yet this seemed odd since we were just on time. I guess the city of Denver had no idea that it was going to snow and the plows weren't sent out until later in the day.

Anyway after all of the trouble I had with the bus we had a pretty good day. The cast did some ice breaker games. My favorite was a game where we had to stare into another person's eyes for about two minutes while someone asked us questions. We couldn't talk so we had to think about what our answers would be, it was really fun. We had our first cast vocals later in the day, this involved us singing Ayiko and Shine the Light. The songs were rather high, even for me to sing, but I got through it.

Today, as in Tuesday, was module day. Modules are UWP fancy way for saying auditions. I started of with singing right away in the morning. The group I was in sang the song "We'll Be There" which is slowly becoming my favorite song from the show. I think I did pretty good, there wasn't any comments from the "judges" as I thought they were. Really they were just the singing staff members. I am now going to be singing tenor throughout the show, I have to say that I rather expected that. We had modules in speaking, technical aspect of the show, costumes, and the worst one of all...dance. Dance was really easy but the way that they taught the choreography was really fast. I was not used to how quickly we went from learning the moves to dancing them with music. I think I did rather well in this one too but only time will tell.

During the day we had alot of free time to meet our fellow cast members. Today I had a very interesting conversation with a girl from Nepal, her nickname is Subu, I can't remember her full name and most certainly can't spell it. Subu told me about all kinds of stuff and even sang me a Nepali spiritual hymn after my intense begging to hear it. Subu has a very warm singing voice, though she tried to tell me that she was a horrible singer. I can't be lied to about something like that. We continued to have conversations throughout the day whenever we had free time. I can't wait to learn more about Nepal.

Later in the day I met a girl named Zelda, she is from China and has graduated from university with an antropology degree. Zelda and I discussed all sorts of things during our conversation, from how her English was to looking past all of the stereotypes that Chinese have of Americans and vice versa. We cleared up all of the stereotypes quite easily so easy in fact that I believe that Zelda and I will be great friends on this trip.

So the day wrapped up, the bus was easy we got home around six thirty. Zola showed me some interesting foods that he brought with him. I was delighted to be able to try some. Here are the names of them if you want to look them up on the internet. Injera, Berbere, Shiro, Beso, Kolo, Dabo Kolo. These foods are really awesome Zola said that he is going to cook for us one night, I can't wait. Well I am going off to sleep now I am gonna wake up a little later tomorrow morning. Hope everything is well with everyone who reads this, and I hope to talk to you soon.

Stuart