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Training - WEEK ONE| | Florida has been so amazing!! I arrived on Monday afternoon (after getting to the airport at 4AM for my 7AM flight  ) and training has been so fun ever since. We're staying at the Swan and Dolphin on Disney's campus:
My room (which I share with Anna, a girl from the Philadelphia office) has a view of the fireworks from Epcot. Every night at 9PM, Epcot has fireworks and we have a perfect view from our hotel room. We can also see this "lake" and the swan paddleboats around the area. I've been hanging out with a lot of people from the NY office as well as some people from LA (some people that I met during training last summer in NJ). Here's a picture of David trying to sneak into the swan paddleboat area:
On our first couple of days, we were walking around the area checking out the pools (there are four or five on the hotel campus and three hot tubs in our area). While we were walking around, we saw this really cute seal and I wanted someone to pose for a picture for my xanga, so Sean from the NY office volunteered. There was a nozzle on the seal's nose, but I thought it would be cute if he pretended like he was kissing the seal's nose, not knowing if the nose squirted out water or not. Sean got down for the picture and then David Li found the button to activate the nozzle and water squirted all over Sean! I couldn't get a good picture because I was laughing so hard, but here's the shot I got:
It was probably one of the funniest things I've ever seen - I wish I could've gotten a better picture of it!
In the Swan Hotel (I'm actually staying in the Dolphin, which is across the lake), there's a Japanese restaurant called Kimono's that we went to on Wednesday. The sushi wasn't that great, but they had karaoke so it was funny to see kids from vacation trying to sing Shakira and the Hanukkah song. Here's the sushi we ordered:
Thursday, August 17, 2006
After dinner, we have free time to do whatever (but we usually don't do anything because we have training everyday from 8AM - 5PM - sooo early!). Since it was Thursday, I decided to go out and just try to make it through a long friday. We headed out to the Boardwalk:
The Boardwalk has some fun places, including JellyRolls, which is this dueling piano bar. The area is really family friendly, but there are also a lot of adult-related activities. A picture of two of the pianists:
The bartenders also get really involved in the singing at the bar (it's pretty fun - they stand on the bars and sing, clap, and dance). Here's David doing the alligator song:
Here's a picture of me, David, Vikkie, and Vivek at Jellyrolls from Thursday night:
And another picture of me and David:
I think my zoolander look is better than David's...your thoughts?
There are also a lot of little candy shops in the area - we found this candy shop on the boardwalk that has sour straws you can buy - here's a picture of Darren excitedly trying out the sour banana:
Friday, August 18, 2006
All week we've been learning about building rapport, being respectful, etc. We also started doing a case study and today, we had to present all the work we did throughout the week. Our team, * (asterisk, in case you couldn't tell), did really well and my group won the competition! (actually, there was no competition but our team decided that we were the clear winners  ). Here's a picture of our team:
Josh (Tyson's Corner office), Jonathan (NY-Metro), David (Chicago), me, Vikkie (NY-Metro), and Jen (Philadelphia). Everyday around 10AM and 2PM, we have breaks when the Dolphin puts out all these snacks for us - we've gotten caramel popcorn, various cheeses, fresh berries with whipped cream (my favorite), chocolate covered pretzels, and all the perrier I could EVER dream of. David and I tried running at 6AM because we knew that we were going to get so fat during training, but we only went one day and the rest we've just been eating like pigs.
We got out really early on Friday (thank goodness!) and headed out to Downtown Disney for dinner at Fultons. Fulton's a Wolfgang Puck restaurant and since we get money for the weekend, we went all out for our first company dinner. Since we all ordered seafood, we had to wear bibs:
He also ordered a poprocks martini that happened to be pink and had cherries in it. The poprocks martini was actually really good - you could feel the poprocks working while you were drinking it! Vikkie and I ordered a bottle of wine (which we finished before we got our main courses) and I ordered lobster and crab:
It was SOOOO good!! We had twelve people in our party (Vikkie and I were the only girls - the one bad thing about working in technology) - and our bill came out to be:
Since we spent so much on our meal on Friday, on Saturday, our meal looked like this:
(no joke, this is what I had for lunch - meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and stuffing). After dinner on Friday night, we headed out to Pleasure Island - here's a picture of the twelve of us in front of Fultons:
(most of the people are from the east coast, except Darren, who's from the LA office).
We started out at the BET club (it was just me and Vikkie dancing...seriously), but then we headed to Motion, where we usually went last summer. A picture of me, Darren, and Vikkie doing my one and only face:
Since Motion wasn't really busy at first, me, Darren, and David started messing around with the locals. Here's my favorite picture from the night:
My favorite picture of David from the night:
And my favorite picture of Darren from Motion:
After dancing and hanging out at Pleasure Island, we headed back to the hotel and I ran into Maulin, Vivek, and Anna, who convinced me to go into the pool at 3AM!! It was a lot of fun (even though the hot tub was like 500 degrees...no exaggeration).
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Today we were pretty lazy and headed out to the pool for most of the afternoon, after reliving some of our IDP days (heading to Walgreens to buy alcohol). Here's me and Vikkie in the cab ride that cost us $50 (okay, maybe not THAT much, but it was pretty expensive):
Interestingly enough, we headed to the exact same Walgreens (they must have a deal with the cab drivers because I think it must be the only store in the area that cab drivers go to):
Once we headed back to the hotel, Vikkie and I headed to the pool with Darren and David. Darren and David both really liked my sunglasses - here's a picture:
In my humble opinion, I think they look better on me.
Since we spent so much money at dinner on Friday, we ended up ordering Giordano's for dinner on Saturday before heading back to Pleasure Island. Vikkie and I are really into taking pictures of ourselves (I have around 50 pictures of just us):
...And we've nicknamed ourselves Ebony and Ivory. (It takes work to be that dark!)
Since there aren't that many places to go on the Disney campus, almost EVERYONE from training showed up at Motion. I even ran into Mary, who's working in Chicago (there aren't too many people from UIUC in Advisory - I think they recruit more for the Assurance practice):
I also met Peter, a guy from the LA office that's half-Hungarian and half-Nigerian. He works in IDM, the department that I interned in last summer:
After Motion closed, we headed back to the pool and stayed there until 3AM swimming and hanging out in the hot tub. We also got these welcome packages that included huge rafts (my future bed, no joke), and everyone blew them up and floated on them (I don't know how they did it considering everyone was really drunk).
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Today we headed to downtown Disney for lunch and to hang out. Since it was so hot, we didn't stay that long, but I did have time to take a picture of the lego lochness monster:
There are a ton of shops that have so many little creatures on the outside - here's the Mr. Potatohead that David and Darren fell in love with:
We hang out with this guy from the NY office named Ounali that's really jolly in person, but when he gets ready to take pictures, his face gets really serious (I don't really know why). In some of the pictures I took from the weekend, it looks like he was photoshopped in since everyone else is really happy and Ounali is just standing there. Here's a picture of Ounali doing his Mr. Potatohead impression:
After getting back from downtown Disney, me, Vikkie, Darren, and David went to the pool (again) and played football, volleyball, and basketball in the pool. These two kids we were playing basketball with were so mean! This one boy, Riley, wouldn't share the ball at all and when I asked why he didn't share, he said that if he had a shot, he was just going to take it.  This kid is like 9-years-old and he's so selfish! After hanging out by the pool, we all headed to the boardwalk again and went to ESPN zone for burgers and the Yankees - Red Sox game. A picture of me and Vikkie outside ESPN's restaurant:
And a picture of me and Darren inside after scarfing down our burgers:
We watched Arrested Development and Weeds after dinner and then I got my dry cleaning (one perk of staying in a hotel for FOUR weeks).
Training has been a lot of fun since there have been so many people, but a lot of people are leaving on Wednesday and we'll start our technical training then. I'm going home for Labor Day, but I'll be here for the other weekends. What's even better is that this week, Audrey is coming for her own training! I'm really excited because it'll be like our internship from last summer but this time, we'll be here longer  . | | | Posted 8/20/2006 10:31 PM - 35 Views - 10 eProps - 5 comments
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