Sunday,June 9th:
Ended the weekend with a legendary day at the largest amusement in Scandinavia, Liseberg. After going to Disneyland earlier this summer and having to wait through 2 hour lines to get on the rides, the 0-10 minute waits for all the rides at Liseberg was a great change of pace. All the rides were actually fun, especially helix where the whole ride is “the best part” of the ride. Once we were done, Ben and I took a long scooter ride back to the Hostel without a map because we are practically at this point.
Monday, June 10th:
This was the first day in our new ENGI 200 experience and even though I read the brief, I was still mostly unsure of what to expect. We arrived in Hammarkullen just before 8 and waited for the rest of the people in the program to show up. After some quick icebreakers via paper airplane, the stakeholder representatives pitched the project to everyone. Our project is to create an outdoor classroom that represents the 5 characters of the Frog, Woodpecker, Mushroom, Plants, and Wilderness. People would be broken up into teams representing one of the characters and would be responsible for the planning of their path and how it would be represented in the wilderness circle in the middle of all the different paths. I was then placed on the Wilderness team with Kunal, a Structural engineer from India, Kholoud, an architect rom Syria, and Mechanical Engineer Megha from Rice. We got to know each other for a couple minutes then got right into brainstorming ideas for the circle and the portal we would have tp design by the end of the week. After getting some exceptional Kebabs at lunch, we departed to the soon to be worksite so we could take measurements and have a better visualization of how our plans would look in the forest. Our group of Rice students left the site around 5:30 then made dinner and went to bed too late. For the time I would have to wake up the next day.
Tuesday-Friday, June 11th-14th:
The next few days followed about the same schedule. Wake up at 6:30 to arrive in Hammarkullen at 8am, then wait for the rest of the people in the dare to build program to arrive, then listen to 1.5-2 hours of lectures related to our project. After that we designed until lunch time where we could get Kebabs from our trusted Kebab man. “Spicy no spicy?” -Kebab Man. Around 2pm, there would be some time for use to do some omore designing before the tutors came to check our progress and offer their thoughts and advice. Since the wilderness team has to integrate with all the other paths, we spent a lot of time talking with other teams to have a better understanding of how our individual projects would come together. By Friday I felt good about the direction of our design for the circle and we made a low fidelity 3D prototype so the other group to visualize how their path would come into the center circle.
After working all day, back at th eHostel I would either be working on the ENGI 355 assignments or watching Avatar: The Last Airbender with Christian.
Saturday, June 15th:
The Rice International Squad had a CAD Midterm due Sunday, we decided to delay going to Copenhagen and spend the day island hopping around the Swedish Archipelago. We spent a lot of time walking around looking for good rocks to climb but eventually settled for swimming in the water alongside a boardwalk with a diving board. It was tons of fun and enough to carry over into the hors of CAD that followed later that night.
