Hockey

Now I am not the biggest fan of hockey, but I feel that credit should be given where credit is due. These couple of guys pulled off some of the best hockey goals I have ever seen. Period.

Magic Touch

So spring break has started and I am not doing anything this first week, which means at the current moment I have moved into the stage of complete boredom.

For my entrepreneurship class, our last assignment was to as a group come up with a new product and give a presentation on it. Let's just say that Steve, you are not the only film genius in our family as the video below will show just how much of a film editor I am. The product that my group came up with was a glove that would allow for you to change the songs, volume, etc on your iPod while you were running, which turned out to be quite ingenious. Below is our commercial for the product.

Firsts

So today was the first day since I have been here where I did not wear a jacket when going to class. It was also the first day since I have been here where the sun has been shining. Okay, I lied about the second one, its really the 3rd, and yes when you do not see the sun that much you do count the times that it is out.

Now for the 3rd time that the sun has been out there has been a mass congregation of sun-deprived people out on the lawn playing frisbee and attempting to barbeque food. Here is a little video of what I secretly hope to have happen to those people.

2 Day Trips

Well now that my bracket is completely busted I figured it had been long enough since I had blogged. This past week sums up what exactly means to be a student studying abroad. On the 17th I was in Dublin and on the 21st-22nd I was in Paris. If that is enough of a description for you there is no need for you to continue reading, however, if you are remotely interested in what occurred on the trips feel free to continue reading.

Dublin: Like many other Americans, I decided to make the trek to Dublin in honor of St. Patrick. However, due to a group presentation that I have mentioned in previous posts it required me to plan ahead to meet up with the group at a set time at a set place. This plan however fell through and I was luckily able to meet up with a guy from Dublin who had exchanged at ASU last year and had played on the soccer team. While the night definitely did not start out the best, it still could have ended much, much worse.

Paris: The next trip taken was to Paris, this time however for a little over a day instead of a scant 12 hours. Having drawn upon my past experiences in the city, as well as the knowledge of my Grandfather. I spent the day going to the major tourist spots i.e. Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame. However, one of the most amazing things about Paris is the beauty that seems to emanate throughout the city. This made the walks from site to site extremely enjoyable and a very rewarding part of the day.

While Paris is an amazing city, the reason for my travelling there is due to my flying into Ireland and therefore never receiving a temporary visa stamp from the UK. It was necessary for me to therefore leave the UK so that I could obtain that stamp, and lets just say that British people seem to have a certain affection to their stamps that they just don't seem to want to share with the rest of the world. After arriving back in Glasgow after midnight, I was held up over half an hour while I explained to the uniformed official that I was studying abroad and had been studying abroad for almost two months already.

Here is a link to the photos I took in both cities...
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2452000&id=10051388&l=6fd836f857

Whoa

Sorry for the delay in posting. It has been out of sheer laziness and in my opinion a lack of anything that is noteworthy to blog about. However the time has come to write something, and for that I will be inflicting upon you some rather mundane stories that will have you wishing you could get the 30 seconds that you spent reading this of your life back.

First off, I buzzed my hair, seeing as I am far, far away from my Mom (i.e. 7 time zones) I am now looking at my hair as a blank canvas. That means all the stupid hairstyles that I did not have the guts to do back home are now going to be tried out on an unsuspecting audience.

Second story to waste your time. I just recently started training with the football team here and to get to the training ground one must take the double-decked bus. Well on Tuesday, upon getting to the second level of the bus with some other mates from the team and proceeded to see a group of NED's (Non Educated Delinquents) already sitting there drinking and smoking. One, very high and drunk NED came forward and proceeded to interrogate us, first asking the most loaded question in Glasgow, "who do you support?". Which means do you support Glasgow Rangers or Glasgow Celtic, kind of a big deal in these parts due to the religious backings of the 2 clubs. My stock answer to this question has been a blank stare and then a stutter mentioning that I am from America. Well upon telling this NED that he asked my whereabouts and not wanting to explain myself any further told him California. To which he launched into a butchered version of some California song which soon turned into American Boy and then American Idiot. This being my first experience with a NED, I will say that they are indeed as dumb and as stupid as everyone makes them out to be.

Third story. Watch this video, I have probably seen it at least 100 times and cannot stop laughing. After you watch it the first time, on the second go around pause it at 20 seconds. Enjoy.

Flip the page

So the past week or so have been semi-interesting on a couple of different levels. First off, I have been dealing with a sore throat for about 2 weeks now, and after battling long and hard, have now succumbed to defeat versus the all-mighty common cold. Now I can live with a cold, but the one thing that I find continuously annoying is that no matter how hard you try to sleep at night, you just CAN'T. It's like that cold employs a specific germ to push the cough button every time you close your eyes and start nodding off.

Now normally in this case, when talking with people I would ask "do you want the good news first or the bad?", but seeing as how I am president, vice president, speaker of the house, and pretty much anybody else with a vote I will give the bad news first. As of this point in time the chances of me being in Dublin for St. Patrick's Day are slim to none, thanks to the wisdom of Retail Management in making sure that study abroad students are not able to sign up for tutorial sections until pretty much everyone else has, thus leaving them with the least desirable time slots. That means that on March 17th at 9am, instead of arriving in Dublin for a day of celebrating Irish heritage, I will instead be in the Colville building on the 7th floor turning in a paper and giving a presentation on the electronics sector and how my specific company (to which I still don't even know what companies exist) are dealing with the current credit crunch and what my recommendations for them are. If anyone has any ideas or wants to plan a way for me to get to Dublin after this is done for relatively cheap, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

Now for the good news, I have recently started playing some pick-up basketball at the gym on the weekends (see Mom I knew I needed to bring my Kobe's), and am now also going to begin training with the university's football team. Having not touched a football in over a month now, I am looking to get my legs back underneath and am grateful for the fact that I will begin training with the 3rd team (and then hopefully moving up). While one might have expected a longer paragraph for the good news, I find that it is always easier to vent and write about the bad news than try to find creative and loquacious ways to write good news.

Oh, and I have introduced some of my friends over here to lexulous and lets just say that at this point in time the word creation genes still reside on the correct side of the Atlantic.

Stick to the Plan!

So I was introduced to this video by my friend Sam. For those that do not know the seriousness of World of Warcraft, and how the people who play the game devote their lives to it. Well one dude, decided to have a little fun with all of the other gamers and this video is the result of what happens.

Fitness Centre strikes again!

Just another little tidbit about the fitness centre. I went to play basketball for the first time last night with a buddy from the hall. Now we were playing a nice full court game in the gym for probably half an hour or so, when our game got interrupted by a staff member of the "centre" (which by the way is completely the wrong spelling and I think the American way of "center" is much better but that is besides the point) because we were not members of the sports club union we would have to stop. Apparently, from what I understood was that even though there was nobody using the gym, and the time and space was set aside for basketball, you had to be a member of this "union" to play. Now you might be thinking, what is the sports union, which is exactly what I thought, and it pretty much is a way for the university to take another 20 or so pounds off of you so that you can use the gym whenever you want. To make a long story short, I argued with the lady in a typical American way, and she let us use the gym for the rest of the night. So DUMB

This past weekend I got the chance to go to a little town outside of Glasgow called Stirling. While most of you have never heard of it, Stirling is the "Gateway to the Highlands", as well as the site of Stirling Castle and the national William Wallace Monument. I pretty much spent all day running around looking at the various sites, and then the group I was with decided that it would be a good idea to hike a mountain starting at 4pm when it gets dark around 5pm. It ended up actually being quite the hike and the view from the top was completely worth it.

Rangers vs. Milan

Last night I was fortunate enough to attend the football friendly Rangers versus AC Milan. On top of that here is where things get real interesting and exciting. Walking up to the stadium (in the snow) with a couple of guys from my hall who were also going there seemed to be this air of excitement about the match, and the general buzz was that people wanted to see the stars of the Rosseneri. Upon picking up my ticket and being asked to tell them my address for proof, the lady chuckled a little bit and said "Arizona huh" when she handed me my ticket, we found our way to our respective gates and entered. Being by myself now, I wandered around looking for seat 0218 in area SW2, thinking that it must be in the upper deck. However following the signs that showed where my seat number is, I ended up standing at the top of the lower section and knowing that I had row C, looked down at the steps to see just how high up I would be. At this point, a revelation of sorts came over me, and I suddenly realized that I was be going to be very, very, very close to the action down on the pitch. As it turns out, that very, very, very close was the SECOND ROW in the entire stadium!

Now for the action on the field, Milan trotted out some of their stars in the first half, aka Ronaldinho, Beckham, Shevchenko, etc. Seeing these guys up close is unbelievable, first off, Beckham's passing is a thing of beauty, every ball goes exactly where he wants it to and during his time playing I cannot remember him losing the ball once. Ronaldinho has the quickest feet that I have ever seen in person, and watching him dance over the ball right in front of me made my jaw drop. The first half came and went with nothing really exciting happening (except that I got a couple of great shots on my camera of Clarence Seedorf warming up, since he decided to do on the sideline right in front of me). At halftime, Milan had all of their substitutes out on the field running around getting loosened up, and the lady next to me kept taking pictures of one guy in general. Now, having never seen Kaka in person, I figured that he was not very tall and very big, because he does not look that way on TV. I kept thinking to myself, "why is she taking pictures of one guy? He runs goofy, looks uncoordinated" and then kind of laughed it off as maybe he played for Rangers before joining Milan. How dumb did I feel when he peels off his warm-ups to go into the game and it turns out to be Kaka, only one of the top 3 footballers (yes, that is what it is called) in the world. Made me eat my own words. So in the second half, Kaka, Pato (more on him later), Seedorf all check in for Milan within the first 10-15 minutes and DaMarcus Beasley checks in for Rangers. Nothing brings more national pride to a US soccer fan than seeing a homegrown talent such as Beasley score a goal against a great team (Milan). This was the best thing for the match, since Milan now decided to wake up and actually play some inspiring football. 

Pato and Kaka are amazing. Period, end of discussion. Pato does not run on the field, it seems like he just kind of hops around and floats to wherever he needs to go and does something amazing along the way. Well soon after Beasley scores, Kaka gets the ball in front of me and just absolutely terrorizes the poor right back for Rangers and breaks in for goal, lays it back across the middle where it hits a Rangers defender, bounces off of another Rangers defender, and goes right to Pato who taps it into the net in less than 5 minutes after coming onto the pitch. The entire second half I was treated to Kaka, Pato, and Seedorf deciding to strut their stuff against a vastly overmatched right side of the field for Rangers. Rangers scored again off of a nice combination, but the real highlight of the match was an absolute laser by Kaka in roughly the 80th minute. Now I am going to try and put myself in the Rangers defender's position: 

"oh look Kaka is dribbling the ball at goal from about 30 yards out,  maybe I should step up to him and make him pass the ball off... nah its Kaka he wont do anything, he is not that good... oh look he is only 20 yards out now, should I step to him now? Nah, its Kaka, he's not that..."

and just like that the match was tied 2-2 which is where it ended. All in all, it was an amazing experience, and getting the chance to watch these guys up close really shows how TV does not do justice for the beautiful sport.  

Start Up

For those of you that don't know, or even if you do know, I am spending the Spring semester abroad studying at Strathclyde University in Glasgow Scotland. So upon embarking upon this trip my grandma suggested that I keep a diary of my experiences, and being the tech savvy person that I am, thought I would just start up this blog.

To start off, the first thing that I have noticed is that the weather is very different from Arizona! As in extremely cold, and I feel that my days of wearing shorts are now restricted solely to trips to the impossibly difficult to gain access to Sports and Fitness Centre (but more on that later). The classes are also arraigned differently, in that I am not receiving tests every couple of weeks and homework assignments, but rather a test at the end of the semester, and perhaps an assignment of two. There seems to be an emphasis on the individual maintaining pace with the course, freeing the instructor up to lecture rather than go back and review. 

Hearing that I would once again be living in the dorms, I had a flashback to my days in Hassyampa and how Freshman year was spent with sleepless nights and countless dorm room drinking experiences. As for that, I give you the European upgrade, and that is instead of requiring stealth to consume alcoholic beverages, I will now be allowed to purchase and consume at my own leisure wherever is seems that I find to my liking. As for the actual room that I am in, I believe that it is no larger than perhaps two study corrals at the bottom of Hayden (but I guess that is why they are called individual study rooms). My mattress reminds me of the pullout that I slept on when I was younger, and is a far, far cry from my much missed mattress at home.

As I mentioned above, I will discuss at a later time my current issues with the Sports and Fitness Centre. However, I will use it as a teaser to get you to come back to this horribly written, and very dry and bland blog.

-Ben