off the plane and I’m in Denver. I meet a bunch of people and we drive in these 15 car passenger vans to campus. Our campus is beautiful, a small college for Japanese students among other small groups, including a team of ninjas, that’s right ninjas, high school students and traveling sports teams. The college is a historical landmark in Denver, the highest location in the city. You can see the bell tower from downtown Denver, which makes it a really convenient landmark when you don’t know where you are going. The college was originally an old monastery so the campus is littered with religious statues of all sorts. There is a huge statue of the Virgin Mary outside the cafeteria. We have a beautiful view of the mountains, rolling hills, which turn into picturesque snow covered peaks.
So what have I been doing? I haven’t had all that much free time so far. Are days are pretty packed from 8-7. I get up at 7, get dressed, eat breakfast and we start our training day at 8. We have done a day of orientation, safety training, CPR, driving, I got certified to drive 15 seat passenger vans, which we drive across country. There are so many silly rules, like if we need to backup the vans we are required to have two people get out, put on orange vests and hand guide us out of a parking spot. It is really silly and we often get laughed at. Today, we had tool orientation. This was fun. We were introduced to using the weirdest array of prehistoric hand tools I’ve ever seen, spiky metal rakes with sharp flat backs. Log rollers, which are basically big fat baseball bats with a spiky top and a weird gripping mouth. Many projects are on reservations, or historical landmarks that require us to use hand tools in the place of power tools. We even have old long saws to cut trees and logs in half. This is not easy.
So let me tell you a little about Denver. Denver is not NYC, that’s for sure. We spent a day in Denver doing a scavenger hunt with our group to get to know the area. The city is pretty dead during the day, a little like Boston with less people. The city really picks up at night. Lots of bars, clubs and tons of people hanging out on the street, remember the weather is still pretty comfortable, 55 to 30 and sunny today. This past Sunday we went to this amazing coffee shop bar for an open mic and poetry reading. This place was on par with the coolest places in NYC. Really bohemian.
So Denver is fun, the campus is great, the people are incredibly interesting, although most people are from the eat coast, I’ve met people from Puerto Rico, Panama and Hawaii. I think the strangest thing so far is waking up everyday and putting on the same uniform, that and the altitude. The attitude has been a real killer. I guess that’s what you get for taking a Long Island boy and placing him a mile above sea level. So I think that will cover it for now. Peace.
Me with my the team Earth 5
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