Saturday, August 11, 2012

Hughes Hall -- Week 7 (Aug. 6 - Aug. 12)

Happy Reading Days!

As mentioned before in a previous post, the academic portion of our program will wrap up this Tuesday when we turn in two final papers and a visualization exercise, as well as take a final test. Then, on Wednesday we have our final group dinner in which the program will wrap-up. After that, it's home to all of you -- unless your family member/friend likes it over here, in which case they will spend a little more time (and ask for a little bit more money) travelling around Europe. I plan on making one brief post next week to wrap up it up as well (probably Wednesday during the day before our group dinner).

This past week marked the end of our final lectures in the classroom. Once again, it was a fairly normal week with class on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday with an excursion on Wednesday. On Tuesday, we had an alum, Jeff Severts ('92), come speak to us in our classroom. Severts is involved with marketing for the Best Buy Europe project and it was insightful to hear his take on how a 'brick and mortar' type store can compete against an increasingly competitive market.

This week, our Wednesday excursion took us to Oxford where we could walk around 'the other place' during the morning. After lunch, we took a trip to Hook Norton to tour the Hook Norton Brewery. On the tour it was interesting to learn about how the brewing industry made an impact during the rise of industry in the mid 19th century in the United Kingdom. As you may recall, we also toured sites that were key to three industries (iron, textiles, and pottery) on our trip to Shrewsbury a couple of weeks ago.
Having lunch at the Sun Inn in Hook Norton

Showing off the steam engine in the Hook Norton Brewery Tour
Perhaps the most entertaining news of these past couple weeks is the majority of our group have become severely ill -- with Olympic fever. With a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a short train ride to the hub of the sporting world, many students have taken advantage of it. Although no one can make it to every event, the students on our program have been to a wide variety of sport. Here's some pictures to recap:

Taylor Hanson ('14) and Danny Geiger ('14) could be seen on NBC watching the eventual gold medalist duo of May-Treanor/Walsh take on Austria in beach volleyball. Also, I misspelled Hanson's name in an earlier post so my apologies, but it's a difficult name to spell because you have to guess on Taylor/Tayler and Hanson/Hansen. I went 50/50 and got it wrong. Good news is we learn from our mistakes. Let's move on.


Carleton was heavily representing the USA while watching the US women's soccer (football) team defeat Japan for the gold medal. 


The following day, a group of Carleton students went to watch the men's soccer bronze medal match between South Korea and Japan
While visiting Shrewsbury, a group of Carleton students got their hands on tickets to watch the USA play Great Britain in men's basketball. Although the game was only an exhibition event for the Olympics, it was very entertaining to watch live. In fact, various members of the USA team have ran into Carls at other Olympic events. NBA stars such as Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala and Kobe Bryant have all brushed shoulders with Carleton students. They tried to get a picture with us but our publicist wouldn't let them.

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