My Duke Experience: London- Day 10 & 11

Julie,

Well Day 10 and 11 have come and gone. It seems like there is a definitive ebb and flow to the workload and stress load. At times it will seem completely overwhelming and other (much fewer times) it will seem... manageable.

Day 10 wasn't anything spectacular, just another day. We started the morning out with Accounting. I actually really like this class which is a total surprise, but I am having some difficultly in it right now. Part of the problem is how amazingly fast we go through the material. We covered EVERYTHING we covered for an entire semester in my undergrad accounting in one day! What is crazy is we go to class and we have already done the homework and materials for what we will be covering in class that day. Then she teaches the lectures and a few things start to clear up in my mind. After class, I review what we did for that class again and then do a review session which covers that material again. Now that sounds like a lot but it all happens in the span of a few hours and by the end of the review session I am just starting to get the grasp. But by this point it is 8pm and we still have usually like 2 chapters, 15 problems, and 3 cases to review for class the next morning. So again we stay up late, don't get nearly all of it done and go to class the next morning to repeat the cycle. We have two more accounting classes on Tuesday and Wednesday and then from Wednesday night to Thursday night it is a CRAM session till we take the exam Thursday at 1pm. After that we are done with residency and we will put away everything we have been doing until we get home. (The hope is we won't forget everything we've been doing, but I have my doubts).

Although we don't leave the hotel very often we do have a beautiful view of London. Here are a couple pictures of what we look at everyday.

Day 11 started off pretty good since I got more sleep than I had this entire time. I slept 5 1/2 hours which felt really good. In the morning we had a team building class which is cool cause they give us all these tests of our personality and they help us to see how we mesh with others on our teams by our personalities so we can head off problems before they start. After that we had an abbreviated accounting class (it was only two hours as to the normal 3 1/2). After accounting they had scheduled some corporate tours for us to participate in. There were only 60 slots for 120 students to go to two different companies, plus neither company was an industry I was very interested in so I opted to go on the riverboat tour on the Thames River.

It was funny because it was like an executive summary of what people typically come to London to see. I have some pictures and a little bit of video of what the tour was like.

Self Explanatory :)

A battleship that is now a tourist site. It is right

across the way from our hotel.

The round building on the left is the office of the Mayor of London.

The Tower of London Bridge from the other side.

The Tower of London. Part of this history has to do with

this is where people were jailed and then sent to their execution.

One name of note: William Wallace: "The may take our lives, but they will never

take our freedom!"

BIG BEN

House of Parliament

The Eye of London. This is a ferris wheel that rotates really slowly and takes 30 minutes to do a full rotation. There are 32 pods that can fit a ton of people on each one. I think it costs like 20 pounds to ride it and so they figured out that for each rotation it makes over 10,000 pounds! Can you believe that 10,000 pounds every 30 minutes. I need an income like that ;)

This is the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theater. I guess they even replicate the way plays were done back in his day and it only costs 5 pounds to go.

Not enough time, but it sounds cool.

Lastly, here is a video of our tour. Notice the school he is talking about, he mentions it is the school at Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) is attending. Crazy how it is right down town.

After our quick tour, we jumped back on the tube and rode back to the hotel. I made a stop to get some gifts for all of my little family (still looking to see if I can find anything for the new guy). I realized I am definitely not a good shopper or decision maker when it comes to getting a present for you. I wanted to get something historical, but not cheesy, etc. Hopefully you'll like it, but worst case it will be a memento of my time away and how much I missed and love you guys!

Lastly, I have walked by the truck pictured below a few times and it has reminded me of all the ice cream we ate in Denmark. I decided to give it a try. It was definitely good, but no match for Denmark's especially since there were no sprinkles.