For the past 10 days we have continued our travelling streak by visiting some states around the US! Our first stop was the Indian Summer Festival in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is the country's biggest pow wow and what seemed like a great opportunity to talk to people about our experiences during this program and the new programs being offered at IICD. So, team parrot packed up our car with a tent and sleeping bags and a few changes of clothes and headed west! The "pow wow" was interesting... I had been to a pow wow many years back with my grandma on of our amazing summer road trips and absolutely loved it; the music and dance, the culture.. it was great and I expected this to be similar except bigger. Unfortunately it was too big. It was completely commercialized. With Miller being its big sponsor and their advertisements everywhere, your typical fair food and prices, the whole thing was more sad then fun. Still we went and talked to people, trying our best to do what came to do. Our accommodations in Milwaukee reflected this same disappointment. Where we expected to have at least somewhat "traditional" camping, meaning some trees and grass and a nice fire, we instead payed $30 for a small patch of grass in the median of a cement parking lot on the side of the highway filled with big fancy RV-ers. Yuck. Still, the whole experience was just another adventure under our belts! We made the best of it and then headed to Madison!
In Madison we had much better accommodations. We found a great couch surfer who had a Korean boyfriend and loved to cook so we were all spoiled with some delicious food which our fellow parrots from Korea especially appreciated She also took the time to show us around town a bit and showed us some great places to put up posters! I was really excited to go to Madison and see the protesters still holding out for their rights. I expected to see at least a few people out there but it seemed it had been swept away. The only evidence that remained were some posters in a few coffee shops we visited and saw bumper stickers on the backs of cars.
From Madison we went back to Chicago where we got to stay with the amazing couch surfers we met when we were there fundraising. This was definitely one of the highlights of this experience. It was great to talk to them and share our experiences on the trip that they supported us in doing. During our time in Chicago we also paid a visit to all of the stores where we fundraised and gave a newsletter with a summary of our experiences, a thank you letter for their support as well as to those who graciously donated money to us, and a flyer for the new programs. We personally gave one to each manager at the stores and then sat outside the store where we spent more time and passed them out to the costumers, hoping to reach some of the people who donated to us! This was a very important and rewarding experience. So many people ask for money to do different projects and when people put their trust in you and what you are doing it is a huge gift and it felt great to go back and say "this is what you helped! We weren't lying when we told you what we were doing. This is what we accomplished and it was thanks to your generosity and caring heart". We also were offered a great opportunity to help out our couch surfer who was fixing up an apartment in a not so great area where a family of 14 were about to move in. We helped him paint and clean and fix it up. Afterwards he treated us to the best and original deep dish pizza... so good. The next day he took us on a little tour of Chicago. He has lived there for many years but he is also a taxi driver so he knows the city very well. He showed us the famous buildings, told us stories of the city.. it was amazing. We ended the tour with the best Chicago hot dog.
As you can see it is quite the adventure on.. There are more stories to tell but I will save it for the next post. I am sure Brian wants to chime in on all of this as well! More to come!
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