Rehearsals

It's been very busy since the last time I wrote something here. These papers tells the reason, rehearsals for Holiday Concert started on last week. After Thanksgiving break it will get crazier, when in some days I have rehearsals at 7am before school and then after school until 9pm. I'm really looking forward to all rehearsals because they are so much fun, but at the same time I know I'll be super tired!

We had a meeting with all of the members who are in Production Companies. They gave us the yellow paper, which has all the costume information. For Winter Productions we are making a short dress, in the picture the red B dress in the middle. Well the dress won't be the same color as in the picture, we are going to have green dresses with green sparkles on it! I was pretty worried about my dress, because I have no idea how to make a dress like that and my host family doesn't have a shoveling machine. But luckily there are some amazing ladies, who are volunteering to make dresses for us and one wonderful lady promised to make the dress for me!

I also have to buy black character shoes with 2 inch heels. I ordered them to one local dance wear store and soon I'll have them! All of the girls have to have same kind of nylons in suntan color. I know I'll be looking really funny with my suntan nylons on because my arms and face are white as snow! In Concert Choir we are going to wear those awesome choir dresses that you see gospel choirs wearing :D

A little sneak peak of our stage during the song Holiday to Remember!
(this was actually from the last year's musical, 42nd Street :))

I'm so excited about these things, because this really is something that I can't do in Finland! And the best thing about our Holiday Concert is that they are going to film everything and play it on our local tv-channel! And hopefully we will get in on DVD too :)

NEW YORK CITY part 2

Here we go, New York City post number two! After spending time at China Town and Little Italy we took subway to Central Park! Actually we took four rides to get there haha. I didn't got pictures down in the subway because I put my camera in my back to protect it, I didn't wanted it to be stolen.

Central Park was really beautiful! I wasn't even able to capture all the amazing colors of the trees and leaves. We went to see the Imagine mosaic in Strawberry Fields and took couple of pictures. Sorry for this strange women who got in to my picture, it was impossible to get a picture of the mosaic without a tourist posing on it!

After Central Park we headed back under the ground to subway and took a ride Times Square! The sun went down already when we got there, so all the lights looked very impressive in the dark. 

When we got to Times Square, me and Luisa were super hungry because we didn't stopped for a lunch. So when we saw Starbucks we had to got something! Holiday season flavors are so good :)
We didn't really have time to do big shoppings, but when we had free time in Times Square we went to see some stuff in Forever 21. It is really big store, four huge floors full of stuff.

After Times Square it was time to head back home. We took a subway ride back to Lower Manhattan and to the ferry. It was really good idea to take those ferry rides, we all got so many great pictures.

The only things that I bought were 10 postcards and a New York mug from Starbucks. I wanted to get something New York related, so when we were in Times Square I saw this mug and decided to buy it!

Well this was my first trip to New York City! Of course there still are so many places that we didn't see and I would really like to go there again during my year here. We actually are planning to go there and watch a Broadway show with the exchange students of my school, let's see how does it turns out!

NEW YORK CITY part 1

On Saturday 9th we made a trip to New York City with AFS! I have so many pictures so I will write a part 2 also. New York has always been in my top 5 cities to visit and now I finally got to visit it. When I heard that I going to stay in Pennsylvania, I immediately started to think about a trip to the city. It's such a luck for me and other exchange students to stay here, because New York is only three hours away! And there are more big cities around us, like Washington D.C and Philadelphia. We started our trip early in the morning and arrived to Staten Island around 10.30 am where we met all other students. 

 From Staten Island we took free ferry ride to Manhattan. It was perfect opportunity to take pictures of the city. And at the same time we saw the Statue of Liberty!

Haha, our exchange student's street! :D

 Then we continued to the Wall Street to see the bull. Of course there were a lot of tourists (like us haha). After that we split up our group to two smaller, my group went to the Brooklyn Bridge and the other one straight to China Town.

The bridge was the perfect place to take pictures when the weather got a bit sunnier. We didn't walked trough the whole bridge, because it's so long. We turned around at the first "tower"/meet-up point. 

From the Brooklyn Bridge we continued to China Town and Little Italy where some people got their lunch. I didn't really care a much about these neighbor hoods, those aren't really my favorites. But it was nice to see different areas. 

To be continued soon!

Halloween

This week was all about halloween! Sunday we went to pick up pumpkins from the farm. This is really a thing that we don't do in Finland. People knows that it's halloween time but they don't do any parades, trick or treating or pumpkin carving. So this was totally a new American experience! We picked up four beautiful pumpkins, 3 for carving and one for food preparation.

I had no idea how I would like to carve my pumpkin, so I looked up ideas on google and I found this cute cat thing! My host sisters have done this before so they were masters with carving. Even tough we didn't used the pumpkin parts to eat, we seasoned the pumpkin seeds and roasted them in oven. 

Monday was the day of the Lititz Halloween Parade! We live just a few blocks away from the Main Street, so the parade came to our street also! It was super nice just stand in front of our house and watch the parade. The parade was longer what I excepted and a lot of people came to watch it to our street. The best groups in the parade was of course my school's groups, the marching band and Grease  musical. Couple of my friend are in National Art Honor Society and they were dressed up like zombies. Just one second after the last photo they attacked me! :D 

And then on Thursday was the halloween day! I was surprised how many people actually dressed up to school, that would never happen in my school in Finland (or then people would think you are crazy.) Mandi and I first passed out candy to kids who came to trick or treating us.

We had this "We've been booed!" sign on our door! This neighborhood had this nice thing, that someone "booed" another neighbor. They left a little basket to our door, which had halloween stuff and candy inside of it.

After passing out candy we went to trick or treating too! I tried to be like a zombie and Mandi was cute cat with leopard stuff. Now I've got candy at least for two months haha!