Exploring the Highlands 21.3.-23.3.2011

The Brief

Visit Scotland invited representatives of various Scottish DMC´s and event organizers for a 3-days familirization trip to the Highlands. The aim was to support  and strengthen the tourism in Inverness and surrounding areas by encouraging tourism organizations to offer this destination to their clients. The representatives visited a variety of restaurants, venues and hotels and tried a couple of activities to be able sell the “true Highlands experience“ properly – and Hello Scotland could not miss this, of course!

Oh, I thought u were from the U.S.!

This is just a short post about the fact that many British people tend to mark everyone with good English skills as "American". I have met six people since September who admitted that they thought I was from the U.S. (or they still do as I wasn´t always keen on telling them otherwise).

Jill, the Sales Account Manager from Glasgow Science Centre, thought I was American, as well. At least for a few first minutes of our conversation. I told her that I came back to scotland by plane the day before. She asked me politely how long the flight was and was quite surprised when I told  her about my boring two-hours flight. :-) So she asked me where I was from and everything was clear. :-)

Me: "I´m from Germany/ Czech Republic."

Jill: "Oh, I thought you were from the U.S.!"

So, people tend to make judgements about your origin based on your accent around here. And they love telling you why you have an American accent even though you´re not from the USA. The most common explanation you´ll probably hear is THE AMERICAN SERIES and MOVIES. And it´s true.... we foreigners watch lots of them.... I´ll rather not count all the hours I spent watching Californication, True Blood, Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Vampire Diaries, The Big Bang Theory, Alias, Nip/Tuck, Dexter, Sex and the City and so on....... I remember watching one British series only, the Black Books (which reminds me that the Irish shop owner was often regarded  being Scottish by some book buyers although his English wasn´t Scottish at all.). So..... in a nutshell, if  the British don´t start producing some famous mainstream series we will be condemned to speaking with American accents only. Yeeeeaaaaaah!

An interesting explanation was once stated by my English teacher from London who said that it is the Czech coming through my English and people don´t recognize it so they automatically think it´s American.

Cheers to all "fake Americans!" :-)

The Amazing Lunch in Science Centre Glasgow

A second day of work and an invitation to a lunch already! How great is that?! We, as a company, were invited to a lunch at the Glasgow Science Centre to sample the new menu (the centre changed its chef and together with him all recipes).

The Glasgow Science Centre (http://www.gsc.org.uk/) is right next to the SECC (Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre) and it is basically something like the interactive technology and science museum in Dresden. It´s really nice for children because one can try out various experiments. I haven´t been there as a proper visitor but Marion, my former flatmate told me about it.

Furthermore, is the GSC a 5star venue for various events (especially for those organised by companies) like conferences, award ceremonies and product launches. So besides the great educational qualities, the centre offers services in event management and catering. We came to test their new catering and to have a chat about past and upcoming events.

The lunch began with a greeting round and a glass of champaigne (which was really nice by the way, not too sweet, not too sour, not too bitter - just the perfect taste like everything else on that day).

The atmosphere was unexpectedly private, only a few companies were invited/arrived. Hello Scotland was the biggest group. :-) The lunch was served in a "bistro style" (standing like at a christmas market in Germany). It consisted of three courses but each of those included several options, so that you ended up with 5-6 different dishes. I took my role as a sample taster very seriously and tried almost everything! :-) I had a salmon with some herbs, cheese and lemon as a starter. I can´t remember all of the dishes as the event happened almost 3 weeks ago but I definitely remember that it was the best food I´ve ever eaten! Every single spoon of traditional haggis, wild mushroom stroganoff and roast duck with a plum sauce tasted like heaven! Let me write it again. I had never eaten anything else that would taste so lovely before! Maybe, except for my mum´s potatoes with greek cheese and leek. :-) We were all full way before the desserts had arrived but that couldn´t hinder us from trying both of them. Yummy! Yummy! Yummy! The second dessert was not so great but I guess that one of the reasons for this was my way toooo full stomach shouting "NO MORE FOOD!!!"

Lets leave all the calories behind and  have a short "marketing" chat. I like the new catering logo very much. It´s playful, innovative, fresh, minimalistic, clever and healthy! Well done! I took a picture of the logos on the GSC menu which you can download from their website.  The catering brochure is nice, too, and full of interesting information. What do you think about the logo? :-)

Life in East Kilbride

The first weekend is easy to describe. I spent the whole saturday in my bed watching movies as I really had to give my brain some time to analyse and save all those important informations and directions I received at work....

My new tiny "office" :-)

My flatmates took me to the IKEA in Breahead on Sunday because I discovered an urgent need to buy a desk for my laptop and a chair to mach the desk. This will be extremely important later when I´ll be writing my bachelor thesis... ufff, ufff.

The IKEA store was really friendly to my purse and so I ended up with a small wooden desk and a white plastic chair just for 25pounds alltogether. A bargain, acctually!!!!

And guess what! I put both pieces of furniture (the IKEA flat packs) together completely by myself! Took me almost three hours but I did it!So that  I could enjoy the comfort of my newly-created office part of the room in the Sunday evening. :-)

Just to mention, the cat is a real cuttie. He´s really old but moves pretty quickly especially when he sees food. He´s obsessed by food :-) And we´re getting pretty well with each other. Thanks to Lucky, I changed my decision from buying a dog to getting an older cat (2-8 years old) from a cat shelter after graduation. There are more reasons acctually, but Lucky was the final reason. :-)

Lucky. My flatmate is lucky to have him.

The second weekend was quite a boring one.... I slept through the whole Saturday, only to wake up for a movie and then went back to bed again :-) It is not easy to get used to the new working life of mine as you can see. :-)  The assimmilation process demanded a whole Saturday for me to recover!

I felt a wee bad about the Saturday wasted so I woke up a little earlier on Sunday and went for shopping to the East Kilbride Shopping Centre which is supposed to be the biggest one in Scotland. It is just 20mins of walk away and to be honest, it really is massive! :-) It has an ODEON cinema, ice rink!!!, curling facility (the ice rink in the evening :-D) and thousands of shops! :-) A real heaven for shoppoholics. I went to the Acessorize store and bought three pairs of gloves on a really good sale.

The ice rink and curling facility

 One store was really interesting - the "Americandy". Heaven for anyone who likes sweets. Going inside was a big mistake, I couldn´t decide what to buy so I ended up with a full little basket and paid more than 7pounds for all kinds of sweets. I´ve still got many of them left as they aren´t as tastefull as they looked like. :-D Probably just a bad choice. 

The Candy Shop

First day at work

Finally! The big day arrived. I became a full-time working student/employee. At least, for the upcoming six months. This post will be about the first day and the first impressions during the first two weeks. Just how I see fit.

The team of Hello Scotland (to read about the company just click on the logo at the left upper side of this website, that will take you straight to their great homepage) consists of five women and a "big boss" Bill who acts as the ambassador of the DMC (Destination Management Company). All of my "colleagues" are very nice, patient and offer me a helping hand whenever possible. Their lovely personalities are one of the main reasons why I feel so great at this company and why I´m looking forward to working at the end of every weekend.

There are further two reasons I can think of just now why I like being an intern at Hello Scotland.

1) I am working in the marketing section three days a week and the other two days I spend helping the project team with organising different trips to Scotland.  I simply like the work itself! It was a little bit chaotic in the first moments. I had to soak up quite a load of information during the first two weeks and even afterwards tons of information literally jumped at me from every single task I was told to do. Especially the project work was completely new to me so I just tried not to think too much about what I was doing, just intuitively decided what to do and it worked. I didn´t even really understand what I was doing at the beginning which was weird and funny at once because I got it right anyway (most of the time). :-)

2) The second reason is responsibility. The team gave me important tasks from the beginning on. No copying, no coffee making (I made my first coffee for others at the second week of working first!)....I had a chance to dealt with real tasks like booking restaurants and updating customer database. Even though the update of customer database wasn´t so much fun as it was quite a hard and long work, I have never felt like I couldn´t do it anymore. When I felt I needed a distraction from all the information on customers I simply decided to deal with another task for some time, for example organising of images on our computers. :-)

To sum it up.... the first two weeks of work were great and I feel like I´ve learnt so much already.

And great things are about to come which make this internship even more exciting and worth every single penny! :-) More about these later..............