First Day of Orientation

We were given a bag of materials and told to build the tallest tower we could, to hold as many beers (what else) as possible. Our score would be the amount of beer multiplied by the height of the tower. Now is a good time to point out that as the only civil engineer of the team of 15 i thought it best to just lay low on this one.

The first picture is our ambitious start using blown up balloons as the foundation. Although theoretically an ingenious way to make the tower tall, this turned out to hurt us.. haha. Picture 2 and 3 were of other groups that had a better run at things. 3 of our 7 balloon solid foundation popped. The other problems we had were three different groups working on three different sections. This turned out to hurt, as well, when the connections didn't work out very well. So, we were one of the 2 teams of the 15 that couldn't hold a single beer. The wining team won a tower of beer, so we were sad! Although our team had lost the tower competition we were the only group that had pooled together our money to buy beer in greater quantities to save money for everyone during said competition, true teamwork.

I learned that out of the 15 people I was the only one that owned even a single gun. This was baffling to me, as well as them. Also, very few people own cars, but I did expect that. I also met a guy from France who has a dream of one day attending an American football game with pom pom girls!

I am REALLY enjoying my team. Everyone is friendly and includes the entire group in all activities. Off the top of my head the countries included in my group are Lithuania, Portugal, France, Germany, Sweden, Chile, Italy, Korea, and someone from the state of New York. Today we are headed to Copenhagen and tomorrow we are going to the Carlsberg brewery.