My first week in Paris has not been very eventful. I’ve either been in class, eating or sleeping mostly. On the weekend however, a couple friends and I took a train out to Disneyland Paris to ride the rides out there, which was a lot of fun. We got to ride all the rides that don’t exist in the US, and I’m not really that into Disney and everything so I was just there more for the rides. After that, we flew to London on Sunday where we got to watch the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, see Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, see the London Eye, see the Tower of London, walk across Tower Bridge, and stand on the prime meridian in greenwich.

I really liked the London day trip because we were able to do so much in such a short amount of time and we were able to see a whole new country. In terms of Paris, I have grown to really like the food. I would say the food is the best part about Paris because it’s really the only thing you can’t get anywhere else. Before coming here, I thought Paris was going to be much dirtier than it is and that everyone would be really rude. In reality though, Paris is actually a very nice city and the people aren’t too rude. I also really like how spread out everything is. It’s a very balanced size for a city and I like the organization of the different areas and how they’re ordered in a spiral. I also like how everything here is so old and has so much history. For example we have a trip to the catacombs on Wednesday where we’re going to explore around the underground tunnels. One activity that we did as a team that I will remember is talking to our client Yousra about the designs that we are developing. It was an amazing experience being able to meet and interact with the person that we are going to help and it has given me a lot of inspiration to complete this project and try and improve Yousra’s quality of life by any small amount. I feel like I was most able to contribute to the project in the 3d printing area. I would have much preferred to do CAD as that’s where most of my experience lies but Mark’s computer is much faster than mine so he got most of the CAD work. I like 3d printing a lot as well and it was really fun to print an iris mechanism today. I also really enjoy using the 3d printers that we have as they are really advanced and high quality. They are much better than the one I built on my own in my basement that I’m used to. I struggled most with giving presentations because I have been very sleep deprived for most of the Paris part of the trip and I have found it hard to keep a line of thought for an unrehearsed presentation. I normally enjoy giving presentations though and I’m looking forward to rehearsing for the final presentation in front of judges.