Tag Archives: views

culture, Europe, Family, New Experience, Sight Seeing, Travel

Views From the Eiffel Tower

By Ross Rozanski

Edited by Natalie Grace Sipula

[4 minute read]

Sweating in the mid-afternoon air, me, my mom, and my sister all turned our necks from left to right to follow the huge and intimidating line wrapping around the base of the Eiffel Tower containing at least 500 people.

“Come on mom; let’s just wait in the line so we can go to the top,” my anxious sister whined.

“Sorry Olivia, but we have other plans and this wait time is ridiculous”.

Photo by John Tuesday on Unsplash

This moment was the first time I had ever been to see the Eiffel Tower or visit Paris, and all three of us were disappointed about this line. The wait to go to the top seemed unbearable on this extremely hot Saturday afternoon, with the temperature being over ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Still not giving up, we went to one of the guides on the ground to ask how long the wait would actually take. Responding in English, but with a very thick French accent, he responded, “the wait to go to the top of the Tour the Eiffel is five hours for the elevator and three on the stairs.” Even though it took us a moment to understand what he said, we quickly figured out it would take us a while to get to the top.

Disappointed, we went to the riverfront to go on our highly-anticipated boat tour, and soon after we left Paris. About two weeks later, I returned to Paris with my brother, Collin, my dad, and my brother’s friend, Dan. Our plan to avoid the arduous wait that my mom, my sister, and I had encountered, we planned to go on a partly cloudy, chilly Tuesday morning right when it opened. We thought that arriving at a less “desirable” time would shorten the wait grandly. We arrived at the train station all the way from the wonderful Disneyland Paris in the town of Marne-la-Vallee about ten minutes after the ticket office opened. Once arriving at the base of the Eiffel Tower, we discovered that the approximate wait was 20 minutes. Compared to my last experience with this line, I was ecstatic.

Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

As we were waiting, I wondered if the trouble we went through on the train and waking up at 6:30 a.m. was going to be worth it. I started thinking back to almost exactly one year ago in August when I went to the top of the Empire State Building. Going to the top cost a steep $28, when the ticket for the Eiffel Tower was only 7.50 Euros (equivalent to about $10). At this point in my life, I hadn’t had the opportunity to travel much, so I imagined that the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower would be about a third as nice, pretty, and exciting as the view from the Empire State building.

Once the four of us got to the front of the line at the Eiffel Tower, we walked onto the two-story elevator which would take us to the first and second floors. Then after the second floor, we took the final elevator to the top, a full 896 feet above French soil. These elevators were able to hold about fifty people and had two full stories. Once we got to the top, the view was sensational. All around us, the city of Paris contained practically infinite workers, students, and tourists. All of these people called the city home, tourist destination, or center of commerce. We saw Notre Dame, government buildings such as the Hotel de Ville, and classic landmarks such as the Place de la Concorde. We all took out our cameras, attempting to not just take a photograph, but capture a snapshot of the essence of what we were experiencing, hoping to cherish this wonderful moment. Although we captured great pictures, we would never be able to capture the strong wind blowing against our faces, the chilling air penetrating our jackets, and the sheer sense of altitude created by the alluring view from the top of this cloud breaker.

Photo by Matt Boitor on Unsplash

After staying up there and watching the city for about 20 minutes, we walked over to the elevator. Going down to the ground level again, we all had something new that we did not have when we first went up. Not only was the time at the top of this legendary structure absolutely stunning, we learned an important travel lesson. If there is a site that is very popular and you really want to see, chances are that many other people will be enthusiastic about visiting it too. But, with careful planning and a little patience, you may find yourself in a place that completely changes your perspective of how large and diverse our world really is.

Featured Image by Chris Coudron on Unsplash

Ross is a recent graduate who studied Mechanical Engineering at USC, with a specific interest in aeronautics and aviation. Born and raised in Massachusetts, he has had the opportunity to travel the world and experience what it is like to be an international student in countries such as Germany, Japan, and Argentina. Ross also has extensive experience in tutoring in different settings, from teaching math in middle schools to one-on-one English tutoring in a prison! He is familiar with the challenges that come with learning a new language, with experience studying Spanish, German, and Japanese. Ross’s hobbies include hiking, reading, and playing video games. He also has a very deep interest in cars. A fun fact about Ross is that he’s a licensed pilot! Always willing to try new things, Ross loves to travel and is eager to learn about different people’s backgrounds and stories.

entertainment, fall, friends, Hobby, lifestyle, music, New Experience, student life, technology

How I went VIRAL on TikTok

By Michael Neufeld

Edited by Natalie Grace Sipula

[3½ minute read]

A little while back, I went viral on TikTok. At the time of writing this (October 2020), I have thirty-one thousand followers and over half a million likes collectively on my posts. While this isn’t necessarily equivalent to the amount of recognition creators, influencers, and the like have gotten on TikTok, but it’s certainly more recognition than I ever expected to see on the app.

A screenshot of Michael’s viral Tiktok video where he plays the Star Wars theme in a parking garage-almost a quarter million likes!

Since quarantine started, I have been creating short, seven-second to one-minute long videos and posting them on TikTok. Most of them involve me playing trombone in some sort of creative way, whether that is playing along to a popular song, “duetting” someone else’s popular video, or just finding different shenanigans to engage in with my primary instrument. I found a variety of topics on the app, such as musical humor, anime discussion, or other interests of mine, and used those to creatively approach the way I made content. Soon, I found a community of people with similar interests. I connected with jazz musicians across America, who studied at reputable music schools that I knew of. They were all on TikTok for the same reason as me: we had nothing better to do in quarantine.

Over the first few months of COVID-19 lockdown, I had a few successful videos. At first, the bland videos would average around 500 views, while the more popular ones would score a few thousand. The response wasn’t massive, but it was entertaining for me to see which videos gained more of a response than others. I then started a consistent posting schedule which set me up to gain traction. I started one video off by saying “Alright here’s Day 1 of me Rick Rolling your feed until I go viral,” and proceeded to play Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” For those of you unfamiliar with “Rick Rolling,” it is a prank that was popular around ten years ago, where one person would send a YouTube link to someone else, saying it was a link to something interesting. For example, one might have sent the link over a text accompanied by an explanation, “Hey, check out this video I worked hard on making!” The twist comes when the recipient opens the link and is sent to the music video for Rick Astley’s hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. After I played day one, I played a harmony to the first track and synced it up, so it sounded like I was playing a duet with myself. The audio at the beginning sounded, “Alright here’s Day 2 of me Rick Rolling your feed until I go viral.” This harmonization process went on for a little over a month, and each video netted me more and more views. I broke 500 followers, which at the time felt like a big achievement.

Michael’s early attempts to go viral

I kept making videos and nothing of note happened for a couple months, aside from a couple hits that broke thirty thousand views. Then I got an idea: “I need to practice, but I don’t have a practice room available because of COVID restrictions. Because I make too much noise in my apartment, I need to go to a parking structure to get some privacy and not disturb anyone. Maybe I’ll film myself in that resonant, echoey space and see what happens on TikTok.” Within the first five videos of me playing in a high-reverb parking garage, I jumped fifteen thousand followers over the course of two days. The culprit was a video of me playing the force theme from Star Wars (or “Binary Sunset” by it’s official name). That video currently is close to hitting one million views, with almost a quarter million likes.

Continue reading How I went VIRAL on TikTok →
New Experience, Sight Seeing, Travel

Witnessing the American Landscape through my Car Window

By Amber Heldreth-Miller

The United States is a large country in terms of physical size. Many countries throughout the world, especially in Europe, are small and you can drive from one side to another in a single day–but not America. Not only is it physically large, but there are many different cultures, ways of living, and people scattered across the land.

The summer before last, I drove cross country from the West Coast to the East Coast, an experience that gave me the opportunity to see the vast change in landscape throughout the country, visit small towns and large cities, and really see the country that I live in. It was a long drive that I did in five days, so I did not have much time to explore each place that I visited, but I got a glimpse of the country through my car window.

We started in Arizona where it is hot–hotter than LA most days–and where saguaros (tall green cacti) sprinkle the desert with their beauty. From there, we drove east towards New Mexico and then headed north to the city of Santa Fe. It was crazy how even this relatively small distance took us from a view of saguaros as far as the eye could see to their sudden disappearance as the land became more rocky. When we reached Santa Fe it was like being in a whole new world–even though we were technically still in the desert, we were now viewing evergreen covered mountains instead of cactus country. We then drove east again on small little roads that felt like we were in the middle of nowhere (that is how many of the roads in the middle of the country made me feel.)

We drove through northern Texas, where it was flat dirt and farms, and then into Oklahoma, where more flat dirt made way to flat grass. Then, all of a sudden, small hills and trees started to appear and, for the rest of the trip, there were big trees lining all the roads. In Oklahoma, we passed through many Indian Nations, which is another example of different cultures that make up this melting pot of the US.

East we drove on, through Arkansas and Tennessee. Since we were on the highway and we were not driving through towns–we were surrounded by wilderness for most of the way. Trees and trees filled my vision in the car.

My favorite part of the entire trip was driving from Tennessee to North Carolina through the beautiful Smoky Mountains, a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains. We literally drove through the mountains, with the road winding back and forth surrounded by the beauty of nature. We stopped in Ashville for the night, which is a beautiful, hilly, artistic town in North Carolina. I ate the most amazing shrimp and grits I have ever had in my life–actually it was the first time I have ever had it–but it is a specialty of many southern states. I highly recommend it!

We continued our journey through West Virginia and through Maryland and then Washington DC. For most of the country, there was wilderness surrounding the area. As soon as we drove to Washington DC, and through Delaware and New Jersey–the roads became much more crowded with cars and the trees and, just like that, the wilderness gave way to houses and supermarkets. New Jersey is the state in the US with the most population density, a fact made apparent from just driving through it.

Even though I was not able to spend a lot of time in each city that I passed through, driving across the country was an incredible experience where I was able to see all the terrain and diversity that the US has.

Featured image from NeedPix

Amber is from southern Arizona but she spent the last year and a half in upstate New York. Even though Amber is from the desert, she loves the ocean and hopes to one day live on the beach. She is studying environmental science and hopes to minor in the dramatic arts, as she is interested in creating films, especially for social change. Amber love cats, eating food, swimming, sleeping and laying in the grass and staring at the clouds. She loves traveling and exploring the world– so far, she has traveled to Costa Rica, Canada, and all over Europe.