This week I had a fairly short three days of work. For the most part I had been working on tasks relating to a corporate bond that Sirius Facilities is hoping to get funding for. Part of this job required me to obtain financial records from as far back as I could find. I collected all past annual reports from Sirius’s website and worked on consolidating records from previous balance sheets. The data from the balance sheet will allow Sirius and its investors to see more clearly and concisely the trend of net working capital that Sirius has currently and had in the past. Other data financial records I compiled were points such as overhead costs. Consolidating all of this data for so many years was very tedious but helpful for me to see how to most efficiently read income statements and balance sheets in a real-life example as opposed to practice problems that we get taught in our accounting classes at Pitt. The other aspect of the data for the corporate bond that I was responsible for creating was an updated real estate structure chart, because Sirius Facilities in the corporate real estate industry. This allowed me to better see the break down and flow of all of the different sites that Sirius owns and manages.
On Thursday afternoon I flew to Barcelona to spend the weekend with a friend who is completing the IIP in Dublin. I had been looking forward to this trip since I arrived in Berlin since Barcelona has always been one of the places in the world I have wanted to visit most. Because we got in so late on Thursday night, we just got dinner and walked around the Gothic Quarters, the neighborhood where we were staying. On Friday we walked all over the city. First, we went to the Sagrada Familia, a famous Catholic cathedral in the center of the city. Tickets were sold out for the day, so we ended up going back Saturday to actually go inside. The outside was amazing, however, and was a style of architecture that I had never seen before, especially for a cathedral. Next we walked up to the top of a hill where Gaudi, a famous architect in Barcelona and also the architect for the Sagrada Familia, built his famous Park Güell. It took hours for us to walk all the way through the park which was filled with Gaudi’s architectural structures and lots of live street music. That evening we made our way back down the hill and had dinner on the beach, as Barcelona lays on the coast of part of the Mediterranean Sea, then spent a couple of hours sitting on the beach by the water as the sun set.
Saturday morning, we woke up to go to La Boqueria, a famous food market in the city. It was filled with a variety of meats, fish, fresh fruits and vegetables, and sweets such as ice cream, candy, and baked goods. Then we spent a few hours walking around the streets of Barcelona where we found tons of little shops and boutiques. At 7pm we had tickets to go inside the Sagrada Familia, which I mentioned earlier, so we slowly made our way in that direction throughout the day. There was a surprising amount of security to get into the cathedral that I definitely was not expecting. Along with metal detectors, similar to an airport, I had to buy a scarf from a street vendor because I was not allowed to only have on the tank top style top I was wearing, as shoulder needed to be covered out of respect. The inside of the cathedral was breathtaking. All of the stained glass was made of rainbow colors and lit up the church as such. I quickly realized photos could not even do it justice. We also were able to go underneath the church into the crypt, where we were able to catch the ending of a Catholic mass.
We went to dinner close by around 8:30pm and on our way out at 10:30, we noticed a stage set up in front of the Sagrada Familia where there was live traditional Spanish dancing and music, so we ended sitting and watching until the end at midnight. It was surreal to be sitting in front of such a beautiful architectural structure in Spain watching a free, live music and dance festival in the middle of the city.
Today we both had earlier afternoon flights and I headed back to Berlin to rest up and get ready to head into my final month of my internship!