You can tell I’m settling in because I’ve joined a new book group! I know it was fast, but Peter Felten’s wife Sara invited me to join her book group within my first week (Sara is wearing the wonderful mustard coloured trousers in the picture), and it sounded really good and the people sounded interesting, so of course I said yes. The book for the first meeting was Ruth Reichl ‘Tender at the bone’, which I found out 2 days before the meeting! I managed about a third of the book once I got hold of it, but I figured they might forgive a newcomer for not finishing the book the first time. Sure enough I was forgiven – maybe it was down to the shortbread I took with me – it was Heather’s delicious recipe (mother-in-law)! The book was a funny set of stories of Ruth Reichl’s growing up before she became the restaurant critic for Los Angeles and New York Times.
I spent Saturday 5th October with a colleague from Elon and visiting colleagues from the National University of Singapore (one of whom, Huang Hoon Chng I already knew well, bottom right in the picture). We were taken for a day out by Eleanor Finger, Assistant Vice-President for Student Life (centre in the picture).
Eleanor gave us a fantastic tour of the Elon campus, and even though I’d already had a campus tour and spent a week getting to know my way around, this tour introduced me to quite a few new spaces on campus. This included the maker spaces on campus. The University of Edinburgh also has a maker space but I think it is mainly focused on 3-D printing technologies (I’ll need to explore it more on my return). The 2 maker spaces at Elon have 3-D printers, but also many carpentry tools, laser cutters, sewing machines, badge making kit and other tools. Needless to say I was very excited by the fact they have sewing machines available to use!
Following our trip to the Elon downtown maker space, we drove to Glencoe village. It is a little less hilly than its Scottish counter-part, and was one of many old mill villages in North Carolina. We had time to look around the little Glencoe cotton mill museum which was great, with lots of ‘plaid’ fabrics and beautiful, old, wooden bobbins, just like my grandad used to have at home (he and many of his family worked in the cotton mills in Lancashire, UK).
From Glencoe we drove to Burlington, which is the nearest town to Elon. It was Burlington where the community event was and photo was taken with the Elon Phoenix mascot and cheerleaders mentioned in a previous post. They have a metal heart that they have installed to replicate the padlocks people leave in Paris and Moscow and other cities on bridges, but this time celebrating people at the ‘Heart of Burlington’. Eleanor surprised us all by having arranged to have a couple of padlocks engraved with our names so that we could add a padlock to the heart!
I was given one which celebrates my time as a Fulbright scholar, while Huang Hoon, Jessie and Siew Mei from the National University of Singapore had a padlock to commemorate their visit to Elon. So if you are ever in Burlington, North Carolina, you can see the location of the padlocks if you follow me pointing them out in the previous picture. I’ve brought the keys away with me as there was an absence of a river to throw them in (as they seem to do in Paris and Moscow). Maybe I can ask someone to bring it home in years to come if they visit!
