Day 13: Dibs

It was surprisingly easy to wake up this morning after a long day yesterday. We started the morning at the Bratislava Dell Management Center. It was a completely modern building, and all of us quickly forgot we were in a foreign country. They had a large population of employees who were wearing trendy T-shirts, and only the gentleman who presented to us wore a dress shirt...which was short sleeved. Fittingly, the powerpoint presentation would not work, which made the presentation quite like a lecture, and unfortunately, less enjoyable. The irony of a dell computer not connecting to the projector was redeeming though. After the presentation, we went on the tour of the building, which mainly entailed visiting the exercise center.

Good cop / bad cop Steph and Christine have Dell visitor badges...watch out.

We then went to the University for lunch. While the meals had been great thus far, today's meal was fish, and not many people were in the mood. While it wasn't bad, it was difficult to eat due to the amount of bones. Once we figured it out, it was actually pretty tasty.

We had class in the afternoon before heading back to the hotel. Here we spent a few hours finishing our powerpoint presentations for the week. Our presentation is on the Ukraine, and I think it turned out pretty good, but again there was much tedious effort expended to convert the slides from Mac to PC. We also have a video of a short Seinfeld clip of Kramer and Neuman playing Risk on a train and fighting over Ukraine in front of a character from the country.

Following the finishing touches, a group of us headed to the Pizzeria across the street to get a nice meal. As an added bonus, the Slovakia vs. Russia hockey game was playing, and for the time we were there it was pretty entertaining.

Several of us have decided the Slovakian coat of arms is really awesome, which seems to make sense since it is red, white and blue with two crosses...very American.

I had a pizza with Chicken and mushrooms (traditional Slovakian dish I guess?). Steph and I also tried another beer as the group of us discussed our presentations in the morning.

We returned to the hotel pretty early and most of us did our last bits of research or planned upcoming weekend trips for about an hour (actually, it was exactly an hour, as that's how long you can use the internet for). Afterwards, Robbie, Steph, Christine and I played cards for a while. It was the two quickest games of ERS any of us had ever experienced. As we decided a better game to play, I told the ping-pong ball joke. This took us to 1am, when all of us decided we wanted some rest before Friday morning's presentations.