Chocolate City, USA

We've been in Burlington, WI, since Wednesday. Burlington is known as chocolate city because of the big Nestle factory that is here. When the wind blowing, the whole town smells like chocolate. Unfortunately, they don't have tours, otherwise we would definitely have gone. Instead, we focused on other local Wisconsin flair, by visiting two dairy farms and having brats for lunch.

Burlington is a really charming town, very friendly with lots of lakes... my host family keeps lamenting that we're not here in the summer so we could go waterskiing. We worked with an incredible non-profit organization called Love Incorporated, which is a thrift store, transition living center, food pantry, food kitchen and many other community services all rolled into one. My favorite part is that they will use everything you drop off. Items that they can't sell in the thrift store gets baled and sold to developing countries for $150.00 per bale of clothing.

Burlington's sold out show in the high school gymnasium contained our sound technician Andrew's worst nightmare-- during the song right before intermission all the sound went out... band, microphones, everything. The cast finished the song "Keep the Beat" acapella, with the audience keeping the beat! They pulled it off so well that some audience members thought it was supposed to happen that way. Many of the students commented in our cast meeting yesterday that that moment was one of their very favorites in up with people so far... knowing that even when something goes horribly wrong, they can pull through.