Introducing.. the Downside-Up Circus!

Okay:  so both Tara and I have been horrible about blogging here all summer.. BUT that’s because we’ve both been up to our necks planning and scheming about our next major project:  the Downside-Up Circus.  Tara first told me of her idea for Downside-Up when we met up to travel in february.  At that point we didn’t have much besides the name, and that we wanted it to be community-oriented and awesome.

Throughout our many long train rides around Europe, we put our heads together to craft a mission statement, begin envisioning a summer 2010 tour (by bicycle!), and slowly start inviting people to the troupe.  All summer I’ve been working hard on a logo, visual identity, and website for the circus.  Tara and our other co-founder Victoria have been hard at work planning out finances, applying for grants, and other business logistics.

Probably most of our online energy these days will go into the upkeep of the Downside-Up website and blog, SO to find out about all our super exciting plans, head on over to www.DownsideUpCircus.org!

<3,

Molly

 

Greetings from my ancestral homeland!

The last week and a half traveling on my own in Scotland has been crazy. I’ve been working at a hostel by Loch Tay, and when I first arrived it was hectic because it was Easter holiday weekend, and the hostel manager took off for the week to be at his other hostel on Mull. It was overbooked most of the weekend, and I had to sleep in a different bed every night.

But the rest of the week was mostly pretty quiet and peaceful. I had the company of Joe, a British filmmaker who was also doing Help Exchange there, and Andre, a colorful Estonian character who’s working at a local restaurant and living at the hostel. Joe is working on writing a screenplay, and we got to talking and sharing ideas. We ended up collaborating on an animation for a logo sequence for his production company, Dreamscape Pictures. It’s probably the coolest thing I’ve ever animated, I will definitely post it here when it’s finished (it’s about 90% done now). Hooray for unexpected creative collaboration!

Pretty much all I’ve done the last couple days is bake and cook and juggle and animate. I think I have improved ten-fold at juggling in the past two weeks, I can do a bunch of tricks now. And I baked chai shortbread biscuits, cinnamon oat scones, and vanilla almond biscotti. All with no measuring utencils! I have a very good sense for estimating ingredients now. Yummm.

SADLY my camera battery charger dissapeared so I have very little documentation of Scotland. I have a few pictures of a gorgeous hike up Ben Lawers, which I will post as soon as I find a place with wifi (I am on a hostel computer now).

Tomorrow I will explore Edinburgh, and on Monday I fly back to Boston. Farewell to Europe for now, and hello to friends and family back in the states!

-Molly

 

why is europe obsessed with nutella?

Current location: Berlin
Current weather: Snowing
Current mood: nutella and peanut butter muesli for breakfast

after a straight-shot 9-hour train ride yesterday (our longest without changes so far!), we arrived in Berlin last night. We decided that rather than take the overnight train we’d find a nice place with a cheap hostel to spend Sunday and the Interwebz found us Interlaken, Switzerland. It was perfect – we went for a long walk by a river, with Molly murmuring compliments to the mountains (yeah. YEAH. go mountains! switzerland for the win!) and taught our roomates how to juggle a bit. the weather was gorgeous, too, which is odd as it SNOWED our last two days in Italy after being warm and sunny the previous week. go figure. we also bought Swiss Army knives in Switzerland, which we’re more that a little obsessed with (hey, can I open that envelope for you? what about that plastic bag? wanna haircut?)

we’re staying with Lindsay and Athena, friends from school who are studying abroad here. this afternoon Lindsay is taking us to an open juggling/circus gathering where we will be communicating with new friends via our happy common language of circus and mime, since they speak no english and we speak no german.

we also plan to hunker down in internet cafes for a substantial amount of time, so we will post pictures. really! we did try in Italy, but the site refused to upload them because we were using internet explorer on an old PC. excuses, excuses.

and really, nutella has been in EVERY grocery store, supermarket, and corner store we’ve been in in Europe. not that we’re complaining.

thank you for your comments! much love to all!

 

Tschüss, Helvetica!

It’s been a great visit: going for snowy walks, visiting the local chocolate factory, exchanging juggling tricks and eating family meals. We’ve made new friends we’re sad to be leaving, but Italy awaits…

 

avignon

we are in avignon! that is about all we have time to type, more soon!

love
t + m

 

preuves photographiques de la france

soon we will put up a joint flickr account, but for now you’ll just have to do with this little selection:

juggling in front of the eiffel tower

you know I couldn’t have photoshopped this because we’re probably 1,000 miles away from any computer with photoshop. I took it with my little tripod.

the view out our shutters when we wake up in the morning

molly mulching in the late afternoon

 

azerty keyboqrds qre a fun chqllenge

we’ve been settling down in Peyrenegre after arriving here wednesday evening…

tara’s favorite moment of the trip so far was opening the shutters (yes, real shutters, wood slats and metal catch and all) our first morning; having arrived at night, stumbling awake and leaning out the window into the bright dawn to be greeted with rolling french countryside was rather overwhelming (and gorgeous) for 8am.

we are staying in a gite, a little cottage/apartment attached to the main house through a large ex-barn. enid and kevin, our hosts, are a charming and straightforward brit ex-pat couple. half the day we help them out with whatever’s needed – painting, gardening, making mulch, cleaning, and the rest off the time is ours to explore and relax. this morning we checked out the nearby town of marmande (which took all of an hour, barely). yesterday we went for a walk around the nearby farms, accompanied by their two little dogs, sam and sally. it’s wonderfully quiet here – except for the hens – and a world away from our normal lives!

 

from london with love

hello hello! (that’s two hello’s, one from each of us.) we are reunited in London – and have been since last Thursday – but we’ve been too busy hijinking to post. here’s some of the things we’ve been doing:

setting up our bikes all ready to transport us around london, seeing a honkingly good clown/klezmer show, playing with babies, juggling, cirque-it circus skillshare playtime, teaching ourselves to swing dance from sketchy youtube videos, and baking bread!

yum! tara wants to give you bread.

 

30 Things

In just over a week, I am headed to London to start my travels with Tara – we are going all over Europe and we are going to have crazy awesome adventures.  Please let us know if there’s anything in particular you think we must see or do while we’re there!  We’re going to be doing this thing called Help Exchange, where we’ll do volunteer work on farms, hostels, lodges, etc in exchange for room and board.  Hooray!

ALSO: check out the rockin’ website I have been working on for my talented friend Shira, who is currently on a national tour.

Here is a list I started working on a long time ago and just recently finished writing:

30 Things to do Before I’m 30
1. go on a cross country circus tour in a bus powered by veggie oil [check]
2. be published in adbusters
3. explore the grand canyon
4. spend one month entirely off the internet and computers
5. go on a flying trapeze
6. design a font
7. intern with mcsweeney’s
8. spontaneously travel with no plan
9. make a feature length documentary
10. write meaningful letters to all the people I admire
11. culture jam mill creek (my hometown)
12. seattle to portland (STP) bike ride
13. learn to juggle (seriously, with all the time I’ve spent around circus people, you might think I would be able to juggle by now, right?  no.)
14. learn a musical instrument
15. design an 826 publication
16. grow my hair out long enough to braid it
17. learn to swing dance
18. build or help build a treehouse
19. design a playground
20. plan a heist
21. make an elaborate meal using only things I’ve grown myself
22. win a baking contest with my muffins
23. teach graphic design with open source software to a community in need
24. design and publish at least 6 issues of a new magazine
25. go camping in the hoh rainforest, the oregon coast, and the redwoods with my friends
26. learn how to design websites well
27. acquire (and use!) a typewriter and a sewing machine
28. spend time in scotland
29. take beautiful portraits of everyone I know
30. open a café/bookstore/circus space/community media center/letterpress printing studio/bike shop/urban garden in seattle with all my friends!

 

reunion!

Reader FYI:

Molly is planning on coming to London in February! The two SCREWY ringleaders will once again unite to adventure through England, Scotland, Ireland, and (hopefully) France. There will be traveling, culture jamming, baking, videorecording, embodying imagination, adbusting, circusing, and unrestrained merriment… all well documented right here on make{shift media, of course!

LOVE, 

Molly & Tara