I started at my placement for community service this week. I have also learned that saying "community service" would be if the service were to be court ordered, but I keep forgetting to say it differently. I guess I keep sounding like some sort of criminal. From my meeting with the coordinator a few weeks ago, I got the impression that we were working at a nursing home and helping with activities. I was very wrong. Turns out that I am working at a community center, and it is for all ages. They are really taking advantage of us being business students and giving us a lot of responsibilities dealing with the business aspect of the center. Over the course of six weeks, we will have to come up with a business plan for their future to show what they could do differently. We already had to sit in on a business meeting for them. Monday was my first day volunteering and I was put in charge of finding speakers to give presentations for the "Monday Club" of 60+ year old women. I did a large amount of research and will have to contact the speakers soon. The people at the center were really grateful for our work, which made it much more rewarding. To make it even better, we get a free meal while volunteering, which might have been the best meal I have had since I left home. I will be looking forward to that every week!
The rest of my week was pretty much consumed with studying for a Marketing test I had on Thursday. My Marketing teacher is from St. Thomas and seems like he will be pretty difficult. I always worry about the first test because it is hard to know what to expect. I studied quite a bit and think it went pretty well!
On Friday, there was a day trip to Oxford through my program. I was really excited for the trip, but it turned out to be quite different than i expected. I didn't have much knowledge about the school before going, and it has a very interesting set up. There are 38 colleges within Oxford and each of them have their own small campuses. Oxford is made up of 20,000 students, 11,000 of them being undergrad, so there are not many students in each of the colleges. I was a little bit disappointed that there wasn't one big gathering place for the school, it seemed very spread out and not much like a real school. On the other hand, the buildings were gorgeous and we were able to get a tour of the Christ's Church, which is the main church for Oxford. We got four hours of free time after the tour and walked around the town, which is small and really cute. Even though school hasn't started for them yet, it was really cool to see students walking around. Their athletics basically revolve around rowing and rugby, which was also interesting to see rowing memorabilia everywhere.
The Christ's Church
The Christ's Church
Today, I went to Notting Hill and Portobello Market. I had been to markets in London before, but this was by far my favorite. This was a really large market, and isn't as much of a tourist area. There were lots of antiques, food, and clothes to shop for. I also really liked to see where Notting Hill was filmed. The area is really pretty with brightly painted houses. I even watched Notting Hill the other day so I would be able to remember it a little more. The blue door was much harder to find than I had imagined, and the book store now sells shoes and is named Notting Hill. Luckily the locals were able to point us in the right direction.
Hugh Grant's bookstore
Nearly American pastries
The blue door!
When looking back at my most recent post, I realized I had forgotten to write about a funny and unfortunate story at the Eiffel Tower. On Thursday night, our whole group went back to the Eiffel Tower so we would be able to see it at night. A few of my friends and I were walking by a man with two golden retriever puppies, so we stopped to pet them. The owner for some reason decided to take their leashes off while we were petting them, and they obviously sprinted away, so my friends and I chased after them, while the owner just sat there. They ran straight for a couple having a picnic and started eating all of their food and knocking over their wine. Everyone was yelling at us in French, and we were trying to tell them we didn't own the dogs. This caused a crowd of people to come over and also yell in French. We were finally able to gather the dogs and get away from the people, and the owner wouldn't take his dogs back because he didn't want everyone to know they were his. Once the crowd died down he took the dogs back, thankfully!
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