My Favorite Blog Posts of 2016

2016 marked the second full year I've had this blog, and in terms of blogging, 2016 was alright. I only published about 45 posts in 2016, which is just okay compared to the nearly 70 posts I published in 2015.

While I didn't get to post as much in 2016 as 2015, I still have quite a few favorite posts from 2016. Whether it helped me remember a great day or event or expressed my feelings about someone and the impact he/she's had on my life, the following blog post links are my favorites from 2016:

Portland 2016: Shopping Haul

Oregon has no sales tax, so I of course had to do some shopping while I was in Portland. I didn't have too much time to shop with all of the visits I had to do for class, and stores downtown seemed to close around 8 p.m. on weekdays, but I managed to leave the state with some good deals and stuff!

Beaver Store

The Beaver Store is an Oregon State fan store, and there's a location in downtown Portland despite Oregon State being half an hour or so away in Corvallis.

I'm not a big fan of Oregon State's gymnastics team, but I do like a few of their gymnasts. Plus, I'll take a gymnastics shirt from almost any university! I'd like to start a collection of collegiate gymnastics shirts. Right now I have Illinois (of course), Oklahoma, Florida, LSU, Arizona State, and now Oregon State!

Portland 2016: A Glance at the City of Roses

Although there were a lot of places and things I had to do for school during the trip, I also had a lot of free time. I even had an entire day to do whatever I pleased the Saturday we were there. I mostly stayed on the west side of town and near downtown, but I enjoyed the exploring I got to do and got to take a bunch of pictures to document my time there.

Old Town sign

If you're ever in Portland and see this "you are beautiful" sticker on a street sign near the Old Town sign, I put it there! It was the first time I used one of those stickers somewhere other than my laptop. If you don't know what you are beautiful is all about, check out their website or last year's Christmas post.

Portland 2016: Food in the City of Roses

Being in a new city for an entire week meant lots of eating out and trying new places. I didn't mind eating and trying a new place everyday, though, because I certainly didn't travel 2,000 miles to eat the same old food I could have back home in Illinois.

Mamma Mia Trattoria

This Italian restaurant was the first place I ate in Portland. It was where my class had its welcome dinner.

All 24 students and our two instructors sat at the back of the restaurant and enjoyed a family-style feast. We all shared fettucine alfredo, spaghetti, chicken parmesan, cheesecake, cannolis and more. It was all really good and reminded me of Maggiano's, only it was smaller and more intimate. I would definitely go there again and try the normal menu if I ever go back to Portland.

Voodoo Doughnut

Before the trip, when I was looking up places to go/eat in Portland, Voodoo was everywhere. In fact, I actually knew of Voodoo before I even knew I'd be going to Portland. I'd heard about it on social media and knew I needed to try it if I ever went.

Portland 2016: Sportlandia Part 2

The view of Portland from the top of Wieden + Kennedy's office building

While my trip to Portland was focused on sports media, a few of the places we went to had less of a focus on sports but were still related to sports and sports media.

(Apologies for the lack of photos in this post. These were smaller places so there wasn't always something to photograph.)

Wieden + Kennedy

Wieden + Kennedy is an independent advertising agency. Nike is one of its biggest clients, which is one reason why the Portland office was a stop during the immersion trip.

The second I walked into W + K, I could tell this was no ordinary office building. It wasn’t just a corporate building where people came to everyday from 9-5 to work. Outstanding artwork greeted us right as we stepped in the door. The left wall was adorned with hundreds of portrait photographs, and the back wall listed a bunch of what appeared to be Greek names.

Portland 2016: Sportlandia Part 1

The  view of field and stadium at Providence Park, home of the Portland Timbers and Portland Thorns, while standing on the actual field 

Immediately following the end of the spring academic semester, I joined 23 other University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students on a trip to Portland, Oregon for an industry immersion course. Basically, we went to Portland to learn more about the sports media industry in conjunction with the course we took during the second half of the semester.

I was in Portland for six full days and got to see a lot of interesting things and learned a lot from our immersion visits. We did quite a bit in a short period of time, so my blogs about my trip to Portland will be split into three: two about the actual sports media visits and one about what I did in my free time.

The blogs about the actual sports media visits will be called "Sportlandia," a play on Portland, the show Portlandia, and the hashtag and group name we used on social media. Part one of Sportlandia will focus on the more sports-focused visits.