Today’s activity was a bit of an adventure for my team, we travelled to the Strip District by bus, and we’re still trying to get the hang of how to get off at your designated stop, but we ended up in the right location! The reason why we travelled to the Strip District today is because we have an upcoming mini project, our overview of this project’s purpose is to warm up for our actual Ireland presentation. My team walked around this grand but subtly old Pittsburgh neighborhood, asking questions regarding The Strip District. For example, if any business owners or employees had any challenges with their store, or if the locals have some opinions on how they would like to see the neighborhood improve. We also had to take multiple photos for this activity, so when presenting to our class and professor; they’d get to see our experience through the pictures we took.

I think the easiest part about this activity was asking questions to the employees since you could walk up to them inside their store and simply ask for 5 minutes of their time; we had a bit of trouble with the locals since half of the people we asked on the street weren’t even from the neighborhood. The hardest part in my opinion was looking for any community organizations, the Strip District consists of many convenience stores, coffee shops, and restaurants; I’d like to believe that this particular neighborhood is known for their food stops, since my team did not see a lot of clothing stores/jewelry stores thrive.

Overall, I think this was very good practice for our actual presentation/project in Ireland, I am a bit more confident to ask random people questions, actually started to speak up and introduce what me and my team were working on. We had very great responses from shop employees, managers, and even got some little history from this employee named Jamie, he was very nice and patient with our requests! Speaking of asking people for their time, we had a very rough issue with a homeless person and started to act sort of verbally aggressive, now thinking back that probably was not the best idea since some homeless people are not the nicest people you’ll meet on the street. And one more thing I wanted to say in this blog, I am still very stressed about presenting this to Erin from AllPeopleBeHappy. Since she is the one we are presenting to in Ireland, I want to ensure all of our research, planning, and pitch is perfect and from my perspective, it will be the hardest achievement to make since we are presenting in a country with different cultures, different ways of doing things, etc. At least that’s what I think. But I know my team and I will work hard to make this presentation as best it can be to our ability.