Day Three,
Today was full of information to say the least. This morning we had to do our quarter three simulation on the computers. For those readers who are not familiar for the reason I am in London and Ireland, I am here for the main reason of taking a strategic management class to finish my last 4 credits of my degrees. This class can be taken on UST (University of St. Thomas) grounds or it can be taken abroad where you receive 6 credits, 4 for the management portion and 2 for the British Life and Culture portion. The Management portion of the class is a computer simulation where we begin a business and make all of the decisions that a business owner/manager would make. Some of these decisions are: how many people to hire, how much money to stick into training and maintenance, how many goods you forecast to product, how many you actually product and in what regions you have the materials in, how much you invest in marketing and new features, and leasing/building capacity. It’s a lot of fun decisions where as a team we have to decide what we can do to keep the largest share of the market. There are 5 teams among the class, so far my team is ranked 2nd going into the 3rd quarter. We were first in the first quarter!!!
After completing the computer simulation we went to a 2 hour lecture section of our class. This is taught by a local Britain. This may prove to be the most interesting part of the whole class. He told us about the whole reason behind all the different names for this area: ie Great Britain, The British Isles, The United Kingdom, and England. In later blogs I will go more in depth as to why these names are all considered the same area. We learned about why the United flag looks the way it does; it is the make-up of Northern Ireland, Scotland, England flags. A tid bit of information I never knew! Another part that I found very interesting from this lecture was that the British found us very insulting for “worshipping” the American flag after 9/11. The professor knew that most school-aged people say the pledge of allegiance but had never heard it done before. Being the group that we are, we all stood up, put our hands over our hearts and recited the pledge of allegiance for him. He was amazed by this. He didn’t understand why we would say that to a flag. In his mind all it is is some clothe dyed in color. They worship the queen, an old lady, but think that is different. Anyways I digress, John, the guy giving the lecture, was questioning our reasoning behind the flag and our professor, Phil, put it in a perspective I don’t think any of us thought of before. The British/Europeans are still tied to World War II and the whole Nazi regime and after 9/11 they saw us worshipping a flag like the Nazi’s did. They saw us unifying under a specific symbol and related that to Nazi Germany. This was the most interesting bit of insight I got from the lecture! On our walk to the tube from class, I spotted the home where Charles Dickenson came up with six of his characters. Yes mother one of them was Scrooge! (In one of my e-mails from my mother she told me to go find out about Scrooge since it was staged here, which I forgot but found today!) I took pictures of this and will post eventually!
After our Abbey road tour Emily Jay and I decided we were going to head down to the London Bridge and roam around. Well, we did a whole lot of extra roaming! Again I want to say we did around 10 miles of walking. Both Emily and Jay are very into music so they wanted to go check out Abbey road where the Beatles cover was photographed. I decided I’d be in for the gaunt because I thought mom and grandpa would find it interesting to see photos of! We went there and had a hard time locating it. I finally asked a local and they directed us. We found it, but only because of the graffiti and stickers on the stone walls surrounding the area. There was no sign that informed us of the history of the road but we took pictures and decided to move on. I guess we were all expecting a bit more. We figured there would be more tourists stores and attractions, but no, nothing that we found!
We followed the river and went on two bridges that two different scenes from Harry Potter were filmed on. For those of you who know Harry Potter, the bridge where the death eaters take out the bridge is one (Millennium Bridge) and the other bridge where the two buses are in traffic and the third that Harry is riding on gets super skinny and fits in between traffic. We learned yesterday on our tour that for those who live in London were a bit confused during the movie because that scene starts out on the bridge but ends up on the opposite side of London! We continued on along the River and found a Galleria of shops. This is where we had a great dinner. I had a rib eye steak, Jay had some duck, and Emily had some salmon cakes. All three were very good! I’m glad no one is sick here because we have been sharing/trying everyone’s food and drinks! We decided after our large supper we needed MORE walking! We ended up just roaming around different areas of London and found ourselves on another bridge and walked across it. As we were going across I got a bunch of great pictures of Parliament, Big Ben, and the London Eye. What made it so pretty was the sun was setting and the way the light was reflecting on the buildings made it just beautiful and breathe taking! London has something like 42 million people (don’t quote me on that) and we ran into 6 of our group mates! It was quite funny actually! After catching up with them we continued on and found City Hall. Beautiful! We came across some very friendly English people who were very full of questions for us! We saw way more than what I have wrote about, but once I get my pictures downloaded I’ll be able to show everyone and describe what we all say!! To put it in perspective we started on the south west side of London and made it to the Eastern side of London. I believe we may head out to see the Olympic grounds one of these days! We talked to a local who said that no one in London knew why they would host the Olympics there because the Eastern side of London is very industrial and run down. He said that in the past year they have stuck millions of dollars in to improve it and that he believes it will be very nice for the Olympics! I took a picture of one of the Olympic flags they had flying; pretty exciting if you ask me!
Anyways, this wraps up another glorious day in London! We are supposedly experiencing unseasonably warm temperatures here. Around 78-80 degrees, sunny with some wind! Looks like we are going to experience a great weekend here with a bunch of touring and walking around! Peace out from now!
<3 E
