Seattle 2018!

Recently PLP 10 took a trip to Seattle, this is my blog post about the trip.

This is my groups ( Luca O, Melika, and Marshall) crazy person video!

PLP 10 traveled to Seattle in search of “crazy people.” Crazy as in what is takes to change the world. People like Bill and Melinda Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. We had been studying the driving question “why it takes a crazy person to change the world.” We were non stop thinking about this question through our essays, our Pecha Kucha’s, and the readings we had to do about all the people. To quote Luca J, I think we “overstood” the question at the end.

Waking up at 5 am to get crammed into a hot, sweaty bus, to cross a border, and drive for 4 hours, is not exactly how you spend every morning, and if you do, props to you because I could barely do it once. The drive was fun after we all settled in to the bus, we saw the sun rise in a new country on our way to our first stop, Microsoft.

Once at Microsoft we got to tour they’re building and learn about the past, the present, and the future of Microsoft. On the Microsoft campus is an area called the Maker space. We got an exclusive back stage pass into the Maker space, because we wherefrom Canada and one of the people who worked there was Canadian! We learned all about the art of doing/making instead of just talking about doing/making. We also witnessed an area to share and communicate, in a very non average office area. It was cool to see the genuine dedication and love of what the people who were working in the Maker space were doing.

Now writing about every stop we made would take forever, and you would defiantly get quite bored so Ive decided to pick only the most impactful stops throughout the trip.

Later in the trip we stopped at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Centre. I believe that this stop was one of the most innovational for me. Hearing what the foundation stood for and how it helped was really inspirational for me.

The Foundation sponsors and funds so many little projects to help specific topics. They are totally into doing anything that helps, and they are doing an incredibly good job. According to Melinda Gates the disease and illness rates among 3rd world countries has lessened by a drastic amount since they stared their work. It was very refreshing to see the creation of caring about others, instead of ones self all the time.

Mopop was another stop that I found super interesting. It was set up so modernly with insanely expensive equipment, that anybody could use. Mopop was created by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, because he collected so many items of other peoples stuff, and movie props and costumes, that he had no where else to store them and so he decided to open a museum to honour the pieces and share his collection with others.

I loved every exhibit but I really liked the Nirvana section. They had so many of Nirvana’s items, such as backstage passes and name cards form tours. It was really cool to see everything and be able to brought into the moment where these items would have been used. It also spiked my interest in Nirvana!

The last stop I would like to talk about is the Boeing head quarters. Of all the stops this was my favourite. (We had also stopped at the field the Seattle Seahawks play at, and we went up the Seattle Space Needle! So for the Boeing to be my favourite it had to be insane, and it was.) The Boeing we visited is in Everett, (just below Seattle). Boeing has the biggest building in the world, which makes sense because it has to hold dozens of airplanes at a time. At the time we went it was shift change and at shift change the first shift of 20,000 people are heading home. The shift change causes traffic as far as can see because you cant get through everyone else, and the highways can only hold so many people. I think I found Boeing so interesting because you could really see innovation and dedication to creating a new step into aviation. While we were there, we were the third tour group to see the folded wing on a new airplane. The planes wings were longer than the normal size so they had to create a way to make it so it would fit into an average airplane hanger. The folded wing is only one example of the insane, and “crazy” ways Boeing is pushing the world forward.

Traveling to somewhere you’ve never been while only with friends and teachers can be hard. Not having someone to rely deeply on to get you going, and to help organize all your things when you move hotel to hotel can get challenging. I get a bit stressed out when I am without my family, so I was pretty scared when it came to not having someone to lean on, but I realized that all of my friends were there for me, and that if needed the teachers could help as well. 

I also felt I learned a lot through the creation of the Seattle video. I felt at the time, that I was doing my fair share of work, (doing a lot of the prep, writing the script, and filming the whole time I was in Seattle) but what I realized is that you can’t really do your fair share when your creating a group project. Group projects are filled by people that contribute to each others work and build off each other, and I guess I just bypassed that whole part of group projects. So for the future I will try to keep this project in my mind, and always keep my mind open to contributing! And if I was able to re-do this project I would try to keep teamwork in my mind, and try to get my group together more to work by sharing!

Now aside from helping me grow up, Seattle also taught me all about changing the world. It taught me that if you can push yourself hard enough, into something that you love, that is also unknown you will create a better world for others.

Thank you for reading and I hope you have a nice rest of your day!

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