This weekend I went on my first weekend trip outside the UK—to Dublin, Ireland—and went on the day trip to Stonehenge and Salisbury. Throughout the week I also some events for Social Media Week, which I had been to in New York before. It’s a yearly event held in multiple cities around the world all about Social Media, and focusing on its role in areas from marketing & advertising, to technology, to entertainment & culture. Some of the most interesting panels I went to here were the ones that reflected on how social media was used in the 2012 Olympics. I thought it was definitely a unique experience to be talking about it in London, hearings from people who both worked on and watched the Olympics in the host country, and so soon after the actual event. I’m sure it will be a hotly discussed topic during New York’s Social Media Week this upcoming spring and I’ll be lucky to have 2 perspectives on it.
My favorite thing in Dublin was visiting the Guinness storehouse. In fact, Arthur’s Day had just passed (in celebration of the creator Arthur Guinness), which would have been cool to see. The tour showed you all the steps to producing and selling Guinness, from selecting the best ingredients to the iconic marketing campaigns. Here’s some trivia: I bet you didn’t know that the Guinness Book of World Records was created by Guinness the beer company, because some employees at work were debating one day what was the fastest bird or some other random facts and one of them though, “why isn’t there a record of this available?” Other cool things were that the storehouse is shaped like a giant Guinness glass (if you look from top to bottom, because the different floor levels are different sized circles that basically are cross-sections for the Guinness glass), the view at the top had a great view of Dublin, and I am now a “certified”
A friend learning to pour a glass of Guinness.
for learning how to properly pour “the perfect pint” of Guinness.
Tales from Study Abroad 