London- Day 14 & the trip home

Hang em up, we're done!

Julie,

Well believe it or London has come and gone. Two weeks of studying, classes, lots of food, cultural events, late nights, sleeping in a hotel, and getting to know the other students of Duke CCMBA 2010 have come and gone. Now that I sit here and reflect upon the time I spent in London, it boggles my mind that we are done with the first residency and have to move onto distance session 1.

I think this first distance session will definitely be an adjustment to our schedules and my work/life balance, but after doing two weeks with the intensity the program dished out, I think these distance sessions will be very manageable.

Well the last day came and went as kind of a blur. The night before I went to the review session and studied for a bit, but I found myself being so exhausted that I was unable to focus on any of the material. Because of that, I decided to go to bed early and get up early to finish studying. Studying in the morning went pretty good, but I found myself at about 3 hours before the test being ready to just go take it. Not that I knew all the material hands down, but there is only so much material you can comprehend and retain in a 5 day period. It is actually pretty crazy to me that in 5 days we started a course, introduced 10 days worth of material (2 class sessions per day), reviewed that material, and took a midterm. Wow. Anyway, finally lunch and test time came around and everyone was just ready to get it out of the way. We sat down in a huge room and were given 3 hours to answer 7 questions. It was a difficult test as the first question took nearly half the alloted time and was worth less than half the available points. That means at about half way through, I had some serious make up time to do and luckily it all worked out. After 3 hours I turned in my test and knew I hadn't rocked the test, but I felt pretty good all things considered. We will have to wait and see how things turn out with my grade. I felt like the whole class was in the same boat when it came to feeling how difficult the test was (however, the CPAs in the class handled it a lot quicker and easier than the rest of us).

When the test was over, it was time for us to go out and celebrate. My team got together for a little bit to film ourselves answering some questions for a video we have to put together at the end of term 3. After that, I packed some of the stuff in my bags and then we headed to a bar called Prohibition. Below is a video from prohibition of the whole class celebrating together.

While we were at prohibition, I realized I was starving and so were some other guys so we went out to get some food. We wanted pizza and so a group of 5 of us ended up walking around the entire harbor where our hotel was. Someone thought the pizza place was on the other side. During our trek I came across this phone booth--the traditional London phone booth-- so I thought it would be a cool picture to insert. By the time we were done wandering around we ended up right back where we started and we went to the restaurant next door. Lo and behold they had pizza. Fancy that. Unfortunately, the pizza wasn't very good, but since we hadn't eaten in like 6 hours it didn't matter.
When we left dinner, we went next door to find a lot of the class still at prohibition. They were heading over to another "artsy" bar called something like "shunt". We were told it was just over the bridge, so I thought I would just go check it out with everyone and then head back to the hotel. Well "just over the bridge" turned into like a 20-30 minute walk, but it was fun to walk and chat with people from class. It was really interesting to see how you could tell the stress level had lifted off of everyone's shoulders. Here is a short video of our walk, not real exciting, but it kind of shows where we walking along the river.

After our long walk we made it to "Shunt" and it was pretty crazy. It is the old underground area (maybe like some old storage units. It was interesting cause there were all these different rooms that shot in all different directions like a spider web. Even from the regular bar hoppers they said this place was pretty weird. Surprisingly, with the environment I would have expected a lot more "crazy" things to be happening out in the open. There wasn't, probably because at this point the night was still young. I didn't stay there very long and then I headed back to the hotel. When I got back to the hotel, I packed a little and then went to bed. I was sure ready to get that day over with and begin my journey home.

You can't tell as much in this pic, but this is the "shunt"

Here's a picture I look of Tower Bridge on the way home. It was cool to have such a huge landmark right next to our hotel.

Travel Day

I got up at 7am in order to finish packing, eat breakfast, check out, and get going in time for my flight. I decided because it wasn't that bad on the way to the hotel, I would take the tube back to the airport. It definitely kept things exciting. The tube was much busier this time around and I kind of felt like a dork at some points as commuters would cram into the train to try and get to work and here I was taking up a ton of space with my luggage. I could almost feel all the people glaring at me, but luckily my experiences from Russia prepared me for being the proverbial elephant on the train so I handled it alright.

After making a few interchanges, I made it to the airport. I did the self check-in and then I went to check both my bags so I could then go through security and wait for my plane. On the way to London, my big bag had been a couple pounds over so I had rearranged a few things, but with all the new additions I was bringing home I was nervous I would be over. As I approached the counter I handed the lady my ticket and passport and then loaded my big bag on to the scale. The look I received next was as if I had stolen the woman's first born child! She informed me that I was 5 kilos over the limit and having no sense of what a kilo is, I just started unloading my bag and redistributing things to my lighter, though not too light, duffle bag. When all was said and done I was one kilo below the limit I had between my two bags. Whew!

I then made it through security just in time.... to wait for an hour and a half before my flight took off. I burned time by exchanging my money back to dollars, getting on the internet, and wandering the terminal. Finally, it came time to board the flight and we all loaded on. This is when all the "fun" began. First, the crew was behind schedule so by the time we were ready to fly out we were already 30 minutes behind schedule. By this point it had started to rain and apparently for a country that handles massive amounts of rain daily, this was just too much to handle. All the flights got backed up and we ended up finally taking off 2 hours later than scheduled. We made up some of that time in the air, but not enough. Being behind made me anxious the whole flight because I wanted to figure out what would happen with my connecting flight. Of course, I had 10 hours to stew about this so I did finally relax for a while and I think I ended up watching like 4 different movies.

This is my attempt at the "1,000" words a picture is suppose to express.

In summary, delays, missed flights, and lost luggage just don't describe

a day of fun.

When we landed in Houston I had about 30 minutes until my connection to Vegas. Not a promising timeline considering I had to wait in line, go through customs, pick up my baggage, take it through border control, re-check my baggage, go back through security and then walk ten minutes to get to the terminal where my gate was. Yeah you guessed it, missed my flight. I actually didn't even get to the point of picking up my luggage before I was out of time. I did make an attempt, however. I RAN from my gate to the customs line, passing many people who probably thought I looked like a big dork (dork sighting #2).

At baggage claim, there was a continental rep there that gave me a ticket for the next Vegas flight which departed about an hour later. From that point I took my time and even found myself some dinner (a horrible dried out sandwich, ok chips, and drink for 13 bucks--ouch!). Finally, it was time to board my last flight, but oh no my journey was far from over. Once we loaded on and got ready, I looked out the window and lo and behold it started to rain, no pour outside. To add insult to injury, it was a thunderstorm and I thought for sure I was doomed to be stuck on the ground for another two hours at least which would cause me to miss my connection to the shuttle. I could feel the frustration building. By this point I had been awake for like 22 hours or something so I decided I would just take a nap. Luckily, even with the storm we slowly made our way out to the tarmac. (sidenote: how is it in Houston we could take off while there was a massive thunderstorm yet in London, where it rains all the time, we were delayed two hours by a light drizzle? Dumbfounding.) I fell asleep as we waited our turn for takeoff and next thing I knew we were in the air. The rest of the flight was uneventful and we thankful landed in Vegas with a half an hour left until the shuttle would leave.

I hurried through the terminal ran down the escalator, caught the train, and ran to the baggage claim area (dork sighting #3). The bags hadn't started coming out yet, so I hurried out to the shuttle, checked in with the driver, paid my money and told him I would be right back with my luggage. This is where more fun began. After watching all the luggage come out, I had gotten my big suitcase, but my duffle bag was missing. We were already at the time of departure for the shuttle so I was running around like a crazy man trying to find the continental lost baggage office (dork sighting #4). I finally got there and talked with the woman at the counter, explained to her what my bag looked like and gave her my baggage claim ticket. She decided she would go look through all the luggage stationed outside the office and surprisingly she didn't find my bag (sidenote: come on, if I lost my bag and was in a hurry, don't you think I would have already looked through all those bags? Hello! Plus it is a Royal blue duffle bag, it didn't exactly blend in with the crowd.) Anyway, I was completely frustrated by this point and I just wanted her to come back to the desk so she could process my claim and let me go get the shuttle (if it hadn't already left me).

Finally, a stroke of good luck occurred... kind of.

The baggage guy came around the corner carrying my bag, WAHOO! However, it some how had "burst open" and now the zipper was busted. At this point I couldn't have cared less as long as my belongings were still in there and it looked like they were. I quickly grabbed the bag and headed for the exit. Thankfully the shuttle and waited and yes I made my final connection for my journey home.

The shuttle was uneventful, I got to my car, loaded up and came home. Whew, what a day of traveling. Definitely nothing to be admired. Well this entry will close my experiences from my first residency with the Duke program. My plan for the next seven weeks of distance classes will be to do a weekly update of how classes are going, my feelings, frustrations, etc. Hopefully as I have learned that I better express myself through this medium of writing, this will give you a better insight to how I am reacting to this whole program.

I love you!!!

Brock