Two days ago I was able to leave class before noon and wander through the old city of Nürnberg. My goal was the main market square where I planned to buy some flowers to put around my apartment. As I reached the square, I noticed hordes of people in bucket hats, sensible shoes, and Hawaiian shirts with their cell phones in the air, pointed at the church. It was noon and the bells were chiming, as they do every day. 

But I was confused, why was everyone staring? So I moved in the direction of the flower stand, dodged some tourists' videos, and looked at the church. The small figures that decorate the center of the tower were moving! Oh. Got it. Moving things. 

Apparently, in my whole time living in Nürnberg, I had never been to the market at noon before. 

My takeaway:

Explore your surroundings! There may be something super awesome (like old mechanical statues) there that you don't know about!

So..if you haven't noticed, it's a little toasty outside this week. It's crazy how extreme temperatures seem to have a crippling effect on our energy and motivation sometimes. So to beat the heat this week, I looked up some out-of-the-box ways to keep cool. Aside from the obvious "drink more water" there are some pretty interesting ways to battle a seemingly inevitable heat stroke. 

Eat Spicy Food:

Though it seems counterintuitive, spicy food makes you sweat without raising your internal body temperature, and sweating is the body's way of cooling down. This is actually why many desert cultures often have spicy food on the menu frequently.

Eat Small Portions:

Eating large heavy meals rears your digestive system into motion, which creates internal body heat.

Eating smaller more frequent meals will not make your body work as hard and hot to digest the food.    Know Your Body's Quick-Cooling Spots: If all that eating of small spicy foods fails you, try cooling down your body quickly with an ice cube at body's quick-cooling spots. These are spots where the skin is thin and the pulse is close to the skin. By pressing an ice cube to these spots, you can quickly lower the temperature of your blood and overall body. See the diagram for these pulse spots:                                                                                                                                                                         PS: If allllll of that fails, you can do as I do and resort to consuming excessive amounts of ice cream and slushies.

I recently found out that belt loops did not exist until the 1920's?! That means that the modern belt and pant combo is less than 100 years old! I found this fascinating; belts have been around forever, but how we think of belts is a relatively new idea. 

Being on social media I often get the comment, "why reinvent the wheel?" Although I fundamentally disagree with this idea, we have been reinventing the belt since the beginning of the belt! So let's keep pushing design and technology and see what the next hundred years in belts look like.