Portland, Oregon

Photo: Neighborly host sisters. Johanna, Megan, Laurel, Cassidy, Tiffnie, Hanna, Sarah, Kellys, Marita and Maria. Our host families lived close together so we walked around downtown Portland.

Portland week was sort of like a blur to me. (And I am writing this in Las Vegas, and I can't even recall last week!)

I was first hosted with 5 other students from the cast - Cassidy, Megan (USA), Maria (Sweden) and Matt (USA), Lucas (Belgium). I moved to another host family in the middle of the week, but that story deserves an entry of its own!

Portland was environment week (yey Kakay and Miss Adel, up to now you are my tag team for the environment!) and we watched Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth which was pretty good minus the snippets that screamed hey-you-see-I'm-so-smart-why-didn't-you-vote-for-me- now-look-at-your-president.

And just to make us aware also of how much waste we generate per week, each of us were given trash bags to carry around for three days. We were to throw our trash and excess food in the bag. This generated a variety of responses... some people didn't like it, while some people really had fun with it. I was one of the people who tried to eat less so we won't carry around that much trash. Food packaging in America is terrible. Layers upon layers of plastic!

People shared spoons, recycled water bottles , or tried to transfer their trash to other people (!) But it really was amazing to see how 68 people can contribute to soo much trash. We were also given the chance to take our carbon footprints -- which basically translates to

"If all of the people in the world lived like the way you do/ use up natural resources the way you do, how many worlds are needed to support us?"

If people lived like me, we would need 3.5 worlds. Oh, I need to cut down on my . One of my castmates needed 12 worlds! Living in the Philippines gave me the edge because I don't need to heat up the house.

We also did Stand for Peace (see http://bananaspinworld.blogspot.com/search/label/Stand%20for%20Peace) at the Prescott Elementary School.

My CI for Portland was for a women's shelter.


For regional learning, we went to the Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument (no longer in Portland, but already in Washington state) , which I think was really nice. Check out the website here. One thing I love about America is how they value the natural wonders (or some) that they have. The trip to Mt St Helens was very exciting, beautiful, and educational!

This made me think back again to Crater Lake in another part of Oregon and how I hoped that our own Philippine Taal Volcano can have a nice and informative visitor center. I guess that can be one dream I have for my hometown.

Two shows again in Portland! I got to meet Katie Allen's (from Georgia) parents who flew in to watch the show. Katie is one of my ice-cream craving friends and also co-child wrangler (translation: we take care of the guest performers in the show) , ah and we are also both "signers" (not singers) for one of the songs. A big hello to Mr and Mrs Allen! It was great to meet you !Photo: Suzanne Maas from the Netherlands is the new Education Intern!