Raving Amicks

Yeah, I finally got to go to band camp!  :)   It was a week-long Jazz Workshop at the Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Worden)  Spent an exhausting week in workshops, listening to faculty perform and ourselves perform.  Food was bad, accommodations were sparse (tiny dorm-like rooms with shared bathrooms).  Here’s some pictures.  Went up with Bob, who also attended (he’s the guy in one of the pictures).  There’s a picture of the corner of the dorm/barracks I stayed in with the ocean in the background.  The trombone faculty member was Wycliffe Gordon – an amazing player (www.wycliffegordon.com).   He’s the large black guy in one of the pictures. There’s also a picture of me during our public performance.   Great fun!   Learned a lot.

From Munich, we flew in to the airport in Kiev, Ukraine, where Vlad’s uncle kindly picked us up. The next day, we wandered out to see Kiev’s Golden Gate, which was a lot of fun to climb inside. Nearby was the kitty statue pictured here with me.

To get to the Golden Gate and just about everywhere else that we visited in Kiev, we went by subway. Subways in Ukraine tend to be highly stylized, with mosaics and marble and granite used to beautiful effect. This seems to be fairly common in eastern Europe, and it was one of my favorite aspects of the trip. A few subways were also very deep, presumably for protection against nuclear warfare, with high-speed escalators just to get people in and out in a reasonable amount of time.

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I convinced mom and dad to get out of their comfort zones and take a cross country ski class with me on Mount Hood. I’m still shocked that they actually agreed to do it, but in the end we all had a lot of fun. The class was only 2 hours long but we managed to take away quite a bit of knowledge. We even journeyed out by ourselves after finishing our beginner’s class exploring a few different trails.