It was extremely heartbreaking to see the US lose against Belgium when all the goals scored were in extra time. I first tried to watch the game on my laptop and I later found that it would just be easier to run over to Thayer to watch it. As I was running down the street so that I would miss less of the game, I saw a couple of my roommate's friends doing the same, even though two out of the three where from London. I later settled down in a restaurant/ bar type of setting and looked on the screen to see if any activity was happening.
I ordered a peach iced tea and sat with the rest of my friends to view the game. Knowing that Belgium is especially competent, it was thrilling and invigorating to see a game of this caliber being played and wondering when the next goal will be and who it will be in the favor of. The main problems that I saw and I may be overly wrong and simplistic was that the defense of the US responds slowly but the Belgium defense isn't strong enough to curtail amazing players like Dempsey as well as a superb goalkeeper, Tim Howard. What is mainly boiled down to in more specific terms was that Belgium's defense more solid than the US's and the defense of the US was easier to catch off equilibrium as well as proper configuration. The US counterattacks were just simply no match for Belgium's defense and the US seemed to lack a central defense as well as center forwards being aggressive enough to secure a win.
Sorry about the soccer rant. I was in the Ratty where I literally was a lunatic sitting by myself with my eyes pretty much glued to the screen. It got to the point where I felt like going up to get something else to eat or drink might make me miss a goal or some great attempt. I saw many others leave after the Belgians scored two goals in the extra 30 minutes of the game and that I felt was not truly loyal and supportive of a national team. I guess I shouldn't have scared other people by making weird noises of sighs and screams to accompany what happened in the game.
This was all after class where I later focused on the topic in which our group will be doing, income and corporate tax rates around the world, what properly equilibrium would be, and the effects of the rates in those respective countries as well as around the world. My group of Caroline and Chris have proposed some wonderful ideas from oil peaks, the minimum wage, trade surpluses and deficits, and other topics that didn't make it through the indecisive deliberation that we had in class. A great video was shown of the famed Swede, Hans Rosling, with his iconic graph of bouncing dots or circles, which represented a data point, and optimism that he believed that China and India could catch up in GDP per capita level as well as standard of living in around 30 years. It was interesting to see how he analyzed wealth inequality in his TED talk where he spoke about how Guizhou is in the area of many of the poorer developing countries whereas Shanghai is in the same league as the US, UK, and Japan. His brilliance and humor motivated me to watch TED talks and other YouTube videos by Rosling for hours and hours, although I certainly regretted that as I had problem sets to do. Plus I got irritated from something I ate in the Ratty, causing me to get ill for some of the night until I woke up...
Also, there is a possibility of a hurricane hitting the East Coast on Independence Day and one of my group members has this crazy parent who will come to Providence to take her home on the next available flight to Chicago. So don't ever say things are definite!
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