I know what you’re all thinking....any festival that occurs in Luxembourg must be on the relatively small scale of things, otherwise we would all have heard about it back home, right? Wrong. When someone in the office told me to expect similar outdoor celebrations, crowds and fireworks to that of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay street party I honestly thought he must be taking the biscuit. Trying to confuse the new intern in the way that we like to tell tourists in Scotland that a Haggis is a small fury creature with wings that once enjoyed flying about in the Highlands before being caught by a net and ending up on their plates. Needless to say we were pleasantly surprised to see how many stages, lights and people were filling the usually quiet and calm streets of the city. The festivities always take place on the 22nd into the (not so)early hours of the 23rd June, and are in honour of the Grand Duke’s Birthday. During the night live bands played on every street corner, crowds danced through all the streets of the city and gathered to watch a grand fireworks display at midnight. The warm weather was definitely a nice treat from Hogmanay on Princes Street too!
As for my internship with Amazon – it’s hard to believe that we’ve been working here for 3 weeks already. Time seems to be flying by! (Possibly helped by the 2 public holidays we’ve been lucky enough to enjoy so far). I’ve now completed my plan for the entire project and have started to build my forecast for ASIN count. I’ll not bore you with too many details or acronyms but it’s basically going to involve working with loads of spreadsheets and past data to build the new model which will forecast how many ASINS (Amazon’s unique identification numbers) will be in each of their fulfilment centres at any point in the future. It’s a good job I’m used to dealing with numbers doing a Maths degree then, and it’s great to eventually be applying some Excel skills to a real life situation. I’ve been told to approach this project from any angle that I feel will produce the most accurate forecast, giving me plenty of scope to try new ideas and to use my own initiative. A review of my work so far first thing next Monday will reveal just how good my own initiative is... watch this space to find out how that goes! There’s also been plenty of time set aside for self learning of SQL which is a standard language for accessing and manipulating databases and used by many large firms for their data analysis. This will be invaluable to developing my project with Amazon, and I’m sure will be useful at some point in the future too, so I’m making the most of the opportunity to learn as much about SQL from the pros while I’m here.
Last weekend we decided it was time to take advantage of Luxembourg’s central location and booked a last minute trip to Belgium. At daft o’clock on Saturday morning we kissed goodbye to a lie in and hopped on an early train to Brussels. As we were pretty short on time we opted to jump on the tour bus to see all the historic sights and of course to visit Mini Europe- the only park where visitors can have a quick tour around Europe in a few short hours. After a hard days sightseeing we grabbed some food and headed for Delirium- a famous bar due to the vast selection of beers on sale. With over 2000 beers to choose from, the sensible ones amongst us opted for a light 3% pear beer, whereas the not quite so sensible ones (not mentioning any names) decided to sample a blonde 10.5% Belgium beer. The less said about the rest of the night the better! After a short trip to the charming city of Bruges on the Sunday we grabbed some Belgium waffles loaded with cream and caramel and headed back to Luxembourg ready to start another busy week with the Amazonians.
Grand'Place, Brussels
River Dijver, Bruges