Events

I walked across the Thames for dinner tonight—my first time out of the hotel in almost two days—and had a lovely risotto al fresco. On the way back I snapped a photo of the hotel where we've been imprisoned stayed for the past week: For good measure I also took another gratuitous photo of Tower Bridge: Because, really, you can't have too many photos of something that cool, right?

As sleep deprivation and other physical assaults continue here in London, and as we begin a five-day sprint through all of Financial Accounting, I pause to note one of the bigger news stories from back home in Chicago. No, not the Cubs sale to the Ricketts family or United's and American's shared panic; I mean the alligator in the Chicago river: A 3-foot-long alligator was caught in the Chicago River last night and is en route to a more suitable home, according to a spokesman for the Chicago Commission...

It's 1:10 am London time, meaning I will enjoy no more than six hours of sleep tonight (including thirty minutes drooling on the breakfast table). Because I'm running on fumes, and therefore no longer playing with a full deck on the top floor, I have decided to post the assignment that kept me up so late. (The essay that follows refers to the InterCultural Edge, an experimental tool for evaluating cross-cultural interactions out of Duke's business school. Otherwise I hope it stands on its own. Also...

They put this out for us every single day: And this is what happens when it's 29°C in Trafalgar Square: And, finally, my temporary Summer Office, the Dickens Inn at St. Katharine's Wharf: All right. Back to work.

I haven't known the day of the week for a few days now, and after today I'm even less sure. My laptop tells me Tuesday. Since I have about an hour of reading yet, then a class at 8:00 (it's 23:15 now), I will simply post this photo and write about building a raft and climbing a wall sometime later.

The results are in, and for the fifth or sixth time in 15 years I've gotten the same result on a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. As expected, this result had some movement at the edges—I'm closer to the center on both Introversion-Extraversion and Thinking-Feeling than on my last test—but my overall type hasn't changed. Notice, however, that I'm in business school. Business schools in general are overwhelmingly Extraverted. I am not. This, believe it or not, is one of the reasons I'm here. The title of...

School has started. Even though we had an easy day today, I'm knackered, and I still have to revise for tomorrow morning's classes. We did our first team project today, a scavenger hunt of sorts for our Global Markets class that had us wandering the neighborhood around the hotel looking for the prices and origins of a few consumer products. We'll repeat the exercise in each of the next four cities. It turns out you can buy a toothbrush at Tesco's for 54p, a 100-gram Cadbury's bar for £1.30, and an "I...

More from yesterday. First, The Bridge Inn, where I had lunch and and after-hike pint: Second, you may wonder what a stile is. It's a fence with a board sticking through it that humans can get over easily and cows cannot. Of course, any determined bovine can simply knock through it, but most aren't that determined. Here's an example: Finally, a house in the village of Amberley. Yes, people actually live in houses like this in England: I will now, in 15 minutes, start the CCMBA. Wish me luck.

(Apologies to Daphne du Maurier.) Back in June 1992, I took a day trip to Amberley, West Sussex, and got attacked by cows. Bullocks, actually. Angry half-tonne Jersey bullocks who knew on some fundamental level what would become of their bullock bollocks in just a few weeks. I was walking along their footpath and they stood up—yes, stood up—like Gandalf and bellowed something that sounded a lot like "You shall not pass!" Today I returned to the scene of the crime. No bullocks anywhere. One reason for...

Yesterday, the temperature in London got up to 25°C under sunny skies. Londoners panicked and fled into the streets. After getting my Oyster Card sorted, I joined the terrified masses and walked from Piccadilly Circus back to the Tower Bridge, 7 km according to Google Maps. Start: Finish: Today I'm going to flee the city (the weather forecast is for more of the same) and head into Sussex, to the site of the infamous Cow Attack of 1992, to see if this bridge is still there: Full report later today.