Halloween

Some brave folks around here decided to organize a Halloween party.

Great stuff!

Being a European, I've never really experienced Halloween firsthand (although imperialistic US culture exports are slowly reaching good ol' world, too).

We had a real blast with people dressing up in all kinds of costumes. After weighting my options, I decided to become Zorro, defender of the weak.

An crazy experience! You simply wouldn't believe how many girl's eyes lit up, once they saw the whip in my hand.

Don't believe me? Try it out! Go get yourself a whip and plunge into a nightlife experience like never before :-))

WOW!

I just checked in google... Shanghai-Matt is now ranked first, displacing Shanghai MATT Trade Co. Ltd. to 5th place (sorry guys!).

A whole-hearted BIG THANK YOU to my audience!!!
Please keep linking to my site.

I still don't show up in google when searching for "blog CEIBS". And, of course, the ultimate goal would be to have google rank me higher than the official CEIBS homepage ;-)

Nervous breakdown

I just came close to nervous breakdown after having looked at this weeks schedule of assignments. Apparently the school doesn't want us to hang loose and relax after the mid-terms.

What bugs me the most is that we have to turn in a 10 page paper for business writing and presentation skills class. A subject which could be highly valuable, interesting and fun.

Unfortunately, the course in its current setup, has ..um, still some "headroom for further improvement". Frankly, I'd say it really draws its main attraction factor off the mandatory class attendance rule (which, btw is enforced by a TA ticking off every student at the beginning of every lesson).

Last Saturday (YES, the %#*@ class is on WEEKENDS!) we spent half an hour looking at DVD footage of speeches and presentations with focus on the 1-3 second intervals where a shot of the audience had been cut inbetween the speaker shots. As the professor pointed out, if you thouroughly scrutinize the footage of "An inconvientient truth" there's actually one person sleeping in the audience while Al Gore gives his speech. Now that's what I call some serious take home value. I bet none of you guys has ever noticed this while watching the movie, right? You freakin' loosers were too focused on the discussion and main content and completely neglected to look at the really important stuff, the audience, that is...

In case you wonder what the frenzy is all about: CNN is coming to campus this Friday to shoot a discussion with us students sitting in the audience. And apparently, some people seem about to freak out by the thought that we could represent the school in a bad light. Apparently they assume the average CNN watcher to videotape and single-frame-forward the airing, especially the audience shots...

Bastards

Blogger.com seems to have dropped some of my photos. At least they displayed as broken link in the blog and they were gone from my web album.

I uploaded them again now. If you got annoyed by the broken links, make sure to have a look at the photos now.

The mid-terms are over!

Finally, we've finished the last mid-term exam. So it's party time again!

I just had OB today and my hard studying of the subject matter seems to have paid off. At least I was done with the questions after little more than half the allotted time. I wonder how my answers will be evaluated, though, as I just couldn't resist to go WAY further than what the questions asked for.

In any case, I probably gave up most of my competitive advantage anyway, because I supplied some fellow students with the book summary I had written (which had taken me about 30 hours of continous reading and summarizing...) And, boy, material like this spreads fast on a compus.

Internal Affairs

Dear friends,

I know you'd like to read more about what's going on down here. Unfortunately, we've been spammed with group work AND midterm exams, so the whole place has burst into some kind of busy-bee farm.

While I tried to resist peer pressure for as long as possible, spending the full october holiday week vacationing with Ursula finally seems to ask its toll. I really have to focus now, in order not to get left behind.

So please be patient if you don't hear from me until the weekend. We've had to turn in a Marketing paper this morning, and there will be the Statistics midterm on Thursday, the OB midterm on Friday and an Economics quizz Wednesday next week.

To top it all off, MBA office scheduled a compus visit event for this weekend where I'll have to show up and fullfill my ambassador duties. In other words, I'll have to make a happy face, show a big smile, and say that none of us students has a work-life balance problem ;-)

On a high note

We just got feedback on the very first group project that we had handed in.

Quote: Your grade on this paper is 96. One of the best papers on this deliverable. VERY strong paper. (As I grade your paper, I’m almost done with the papers and this is the highest grade so far…)

Let's hope this is a better predictor for future performance than the Marketing papers, where the class was slammed with a 76 point average, that "had been artifically raised in order not to demotivate everyone"...

My Hand is killing me

Hell, does my hand hurt! I'm just no longer used to writing stuff by hand. The reason is, that we have to turn in the &@*% Financial Accounting homework handwritten.

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?

I've been using computers since childhood and now they actually expect me to emulate a spreadsheet on paper?! Of course I did the whole thing in Excel, with the effect that I now just spent 5 absolutely unproductive hours copying numbers from my computer screen to 22 doublesided pages of A4. Not exactly what I imagined my learning experience to be...

Bye bye Shanghai

Tonight was the last night before Ursulas return to Switzerland so we went for a drink at Cloud 9, the famous bar on the 88th floor of JinMao Tower. As an extra courtesy, the recent Taifun had washed the air clean of any dust and it was an amazing view. I mean really, we had a view that went beyond anything I had ever seen previously. You could literally see lights up to the horizon. I tell you guys, this city rocks!

Formula-1

This Sunday we went to the Formula-1 race in Shanghai. Turns out the damn' race course is out of town. It took us almost two hours to get there by shuttle bus.

It really was a fun experience. To be honest I had been afraid that it might be rather boring to sit there an watch cars pass, but actually it was great fun and the time passed very quickly.

On a side note: Since it was a rainy day we spend 25 Yuen on an umbrella sold to us by a tout on the street. This is more than two times the regular price. Needless to say that it took less than 5 minutes for the umbrella to fall completely apart, such bad was the quality... I'm consistently amazed by how much waste is produced in this country just by selling the utmost crappy quality!

Bamboo Chicken

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!?
We just had the "specialty" of Longshen restaurants: Bamboo chicken. First I was disappointed that the bamboo mouse as listed on the menu was currently unavailable. But once I got my "chicken" I was immediately delighted not to have ordered the mouse.

Basically, the entrepreneurial spirit of Longshen rice farmers has taken their approach to gastronomy to a whole new level.

They kill the chickens and take all the good meat (wings, breasts, etc.) for themselves. The remains, rather than being disposed of, then get shredded, stuffed into bamboo tubes, smoked over unhealthy coal fires and sold to dumb enough foreign tourists as a "specialty" at exorbitant prices! Nice business model.

Got Rice?

After a long bus ride we managed to get from Yangshuo to Longshen. Let me say so much: The place is about as expensive as it is beautiful. The entrepreneurial spirit of Chinese rice farmers seems to be unrivalled. They now charge 50 RMB entry fee into their village, which - judging from the number of tour buses on the parking lot - likely surpasses their income from farming.

How much longer until they realize that they can even have tourists pay to work on the rice paddies for a day? All they'll then have to do is charge some tourists to prepare the rice fields and charge all other tourists to watch them get prepared. What a deal!

River Cruise

We've taken the boat down the river to Yangshuo. Like this we got a chance to really appreciate the karst landscape around Guilin which is really fascinating. We've also encountered countless fishing vessels, water buffalows and bamboo rafts.

Dreamlike LiJiang

We went to see a show called "Dreamlike LiJang". Listen carfully: THIS IS A MUST! If you visited Guilin and haven't gone to this show, you haven't seen Guilin. Period. The show is an excellent mixture of acrobatics, choreography, stage design, light design and it contains many elements I haven't seen anywhere before. And I've been to many shows, believe me.

Dreamlike LiJang is probably best described as a chinese indoor version of Cirque de Soleil, at one-fifth the expense.