The Dragon Hunt

Last weekend at SUNY Cortland was the annual “Dragon Hunt.” Almost forty teams of four spent an entire six hours out of their Saturdays, running all over Cortland trying to accomplish as many of the tasks on their list as possible. I was fortunate enough to be one of the lucky participants. When I first got the invite to participate from one of my friends, I wanted nothing to do with the competition, but after I heard that the first place prize was four tickets worth $500 to anywhere JetBlue flies, I was ready to go.
From 11:45 – 12:00 we were briefed on the rules and schedules of the massive school scavenger hunt. After all the groups got their marathon runner tags and list of scavenger hunt items. Once it hit 12 O’clock all the teams dashed off to get as many pictures as they could. The list took us all over campus from the football stadium all the way to the west campus apartments. We had to take pictures of the items on the list as proof of our accomplishing the action. Throughout the event I learned more and more about the history of the school as well as the locations of landmarks of the school.
The hunt also took us to the “Pumpkin Fair” in downtown Cortland. Being a transfer sophomore and new resident of Cortland, I had never heard of the Pumpkin Fair. I was glad we ended up there because I got a chance to see all the fun opportunities at the annual Pumpkin Fair. While checking off accomplishments on our list, I was also able to see Cortland’s largest pumpkin as well as try fresh apple cider and other craft and farm stands.
After six long hours we headed back to the meeting room in Corey Union to hand in hour’s worth of running around and searching. Although our group did not win those coveted JetBlue tickets, we did manage to make it in the top ten. It was a great experience despite losing and I cannot wait for next year’s Dragon Hunt.

Lost Olympics

For the past few weeks there has been a great deal of excitement over the location of the 2016 Olympic Games. There were four cities vying for the Olympic bid: Tokyo, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Chicago. With the struggling US economy many believed the Olympic Games would give this country a much needed economic boost once the games came in 2016. One thing many people didn’t and know is that hosting the Olympic Games would cost our country over one billion dollars just to build the stadium to hold the games. This newly built stadium would only be temporary for the 2016 games.
Even President Obama put forth a great effort to help bring the games to Chicago. President Obama even traveled to Copenhagen in an attempt to argue the case for the U.S. To the surprise of many Chicago was the first city to be eliminated. Tokyo followed soon after as the second city to be eliminated. In the end that favored Rio de Janeiro beat out Madrid for the 2016 Olympic Games.
In my opinion Chicago was beat out due to the strong opposition that much of the world has towards the United States. Although it was just speculation experts believed that a Chicago was the best candidate for the 2016 winter Olympic capital Games, and the fact that it was immediately eliminated is somewhat suspicious. The judges were even told before hand to vote on an unbiased basis.
As far as the economy is concerned I don’t believe the loss of the Olympics is going to affect us too severely. 2016 is a little less than seven years away. While the Olympics would help our economy, I believe that in seven years we will not be in the financial trouble we are now. It still would have been nice to have something like that to get our country excited. We will just have to find something else to unify us.