la paz pictures!

so the internet here in cabo san lucas is letting me post pictures! yay. 

oh and by the way, that last week in la paz was thanks to the donations made by my grandpa and grandma wiggins! i love you guys, thanks so much for everything. :)

our view from the balcony during the day.

the house was so cool!

it was a huuuge balcony.

living room.

view from the balcony at night time.

our neighbors came over for a bbq/pool party and they were hosting celiana too, a staff member from venezuela. these two girls, paula and mariana, were some of the sweeetessttt girls i've ever met. :) 

(ahhh that's all that's working so far. i'll update later!)

last week in denver, breckenridge, and la paz.

okayyy, it's been awhile since i blogged! but we've been so busy lately.

i don't have any pictures from our first dress rehearsal yet because i didn't take any with my camera.  the dress rehearsal was soooo nerve wracking, and it didn't go very well. haha but that's what a dress rehearsal is for!

we left for breckenridge, colorado the following monday. we stopped at idaho springs on the way up, went into some mines, and panned for gold. our host family was becky and chris elcan. unfortunately we only spent about 4 days in breckenridge, so we didn't spend too much time with them or take any pictures. but we had a really good time! my room mates were cathrine (again haha) and isabel from germany. the community service i did was painting a middle school. our show that week was SO much better than the week before! haha it was suchhh an improvement. 

pictures!!

okay i lied, no pictures yet because this blog website is being weird and won't let me upload them. but i'll post another blog as soon as i can with pictures.

la paz, mexico!

okay well here's the story as to how we got here. on friday in breckenridge, we were dropped off in the morning at beaver run resort and said bye to our host families. so we stayed there all day. and then at night we got to walk downtown. it was pouring rain, and it was about 45 degrees. freeezing cold. and then we came back to the hotel and played in the arcade. i ended up talking to my friend zach for about 2 hours, i called people and said bye, went on the computer, and read. then at 3:30 am we starting packing up the buses so we could get to the denver airport by 6 am. on the way to the airport, it was snowing. YES in the middle of august it was snowing. from the airport we took a flight to los cabos, mexico. we got on yet another bus to drive to la paz. on the way there we stopped at an AWESOME little food place. i love authentic mexican food, haha. then finally we got to la paz. where it was (and will always be) SO hot. we went from snowing to over a hundred degrees in 10 hours. weird feeling. this is about the time i found out i'd be staying with a family in la paz, mexico alllll by myself. haha i was worried for awhile. but after i spent some time with my host family i knew i'd be fine because they are SO nice. pepe and silvia are the parents and they have two kids. alexis (who is 16) and michelle (who is 8). alexis speaks spanish because he learned it in school, but michelle is 8 so she doesn't speak english yet. funny enough, i talk to her just as much as anyone else in the family. :) we play this board games that's pretty simple. you roll the dice and you have to answer a question to move forward. it's a kid's game, so the questions are easy but they're, of course, in spanish. so to improve my spanish, i've been playing this game with her a lot and translating some words on my computer. and then sometimes i teach her the words in english too. :)

the other night i went with alexis and we went to a party with some of his friends from high school. most of the kids spoke some english, so it was fun. and i tried out some of my terrible spanish haha. two of my uwp friends happened to be there too! so it was fun. :)

then today, i woke up around 12pm because i hadn't slept the night before. but then silvia, michelle, and i went out to buy food and other things. (like lotion cause the airport security threw mine away lol). that night some neighbors came over and we went swimming. luckily they spoke some english to me! i didn't understand most of what everyone said, but i'm still trying to learn. 

anyways, tomorrow we have community service! we're painting over graffiti at the baseball stadium we're performing at. the pictures i have of la paz are GORGEOUS i can't wait until i can post them. :)

3rd week in denver

soooo, i left my camera charger at home. which my mom will be bringing to me! but luckily some other people have been taking pictures of me that i can post. :)

i've discovered that i'm not too fabulous at using blogspot. and posting pictures and writing next to it is very difficult and takes me a long time. haha, so i'll just post the captions first by number and the photos will be in that order at the end. 

1) finally, here's a picture of the home we've been staying in! it's a bright blue split level home. we've been here so long i can't imagine being some where else. definitely going to have to get used to that soon though since we'll be in a different home each week.

2) cathrine had never tasted sushi before! so our host family took us out to a reallyyy good sushi place. i was surprised how good it was even though we weren't close to the ocean, like i was used to. hah. 

3) the next night we decided to experiment with the sushi idea and had home made sushi for dinner! it was so fun making all the rolls. they didn't taste all that bad either. :)

4) we finally had our first community impact day. (CI day) we went to an area up in the mountains that was burned by the hayman fires, and still had not recovered from the damage. we all had a lot of different jobs that day. my jobs were to remove fallen trees and to put them in ravines to reduce erosion when the rain came. also, i dug holes and planted small trees to help regrow the area. it was a lottttt of hard work. walking up a 45 degree angle at all times gets a little difficult. but it was definitely worth it! by the end of the day, we could really SEE the impact we'd made on those few acres.