Party, Party, Party

Pweeh! Student life can be really tiring...

A few days ago was Rod's birthday. So we all met in a Korean restaurant for a great dinner and then headed downtown to Richy to party.

Yesterday Dani hosted a party in his apartment. Nice place, great crowd, loads of alcohol...

Gosh, how I hate does drinking games! Ever tried Jenga with a Whisky shot penalty for toppling the tower? It's the perfect example of a downward spiral. The more you drink, the more you overestimate your abilities, the more you gotta drink. The really bad thing, however, is that we run out of Whisky pretty soon, and then had to move to Vodka, then Tequila, then Gin and finally red wine. Do not ask about the next morning, please!

Turn's out we trashed the place quite a bit... Sorry dude, but I'm sure the bed would have broken anyway, so you better be grateful that we preemptied a possibly embarrasing situation in your future love life!

This Friday will be a party at "Terence & the girls". This lucky bastard shares an apartment with three girls. The only drawback? For each threesome, there's one jealous girl ;-)

A night out at Malones

Yesterday we went out to celebrate. No, there was no particular reason for it. Why on earth would we need a reason anyway? Relying on reasons just limits opportunities for celebration. Comprendre?

The evening didn't begin very promising though. I went out to have dinner with some '06 students. They brought me to this burger place, where the milk shake alone adds about 2 dinner's worth of calories to your diet.

I then went to People7, a really cool restaurant/bar to meet some other '06ers 'cause I'm trying to figure out which of the coming electives are worth going to, which obbviously requires highly classified insider knowledge...

Once I was done there and wanted to meet my own crowd it had started to massively pour down. And as local expats tend to put it: "Whenever the environment turns hostile, there are no more taxis available".

It took me about an hour to get a transport, despite all attempts, including trying to "buy" a taxi from existing occupants. What do you mean you can't do that? Of course you can. This is China, the worlds most advanced capitalistic system. Money will buy you (almost) anything in this place.

Finally I made it to Malones, a cool bar I hadn't known before where my people where hanging out. Quite nice, great live band and a good crowd.

It's raining cats and dogs

Well, not literally, but the weather really is rather shitty right now!

However, Chinese people seem to be very inventive dealing with the situation (and their pets)...

Tonight we had the farewell dinner for the MBA 2006 class. It was a great event hosted in the Ramada hotel. As part of the show they screened a 10 minute movie called the MBATRIX.

Essentially it was a short version of The Matrix re-staged with many personalities of CEIBS. Absolutely hilarious! Eleven out of ten for this one!

They re-did all the special effects and people rolled on the floor laughing when they had canteen personell turn into agents. The famous scene where Morpheous shows Neo the "real world" accurately reframed canteen food and in the end our statistics professor was cast as "the architect".

It's gonna be very hard to top this one on our own farewell party.

Any regrets?

So the term is well underway and last year's class of MBA 2006 students is back on campus.

Nick Conti, one of the '06 party animals took the initiative to organize a night out for both classes. And go out we did...

We kicked off the evening at Cotton Club, a small jazz club with life music and then we went on to Muse, one of the stylish clubs in Shanghai with a fairly international crowd. Some say most of the Chinese girls there are models, but I think there might be another reason to it: Add enough drinks and every girl starts to look like a model...

Model or not - we certainly had a blast! There was a life band on the upper floor that performed really well and the DJ played some of the coolest mixes I've ever heard.

At some point during the night, Patrick (the '06 Swiss student who got me here in the first place) came up to me and asked "So how is it now, do you have any regrets coming to Shanghai?".

No. None. Zero. This is a cool place to be. Absolutely. One of the greatest experiences of my life!

Fantastic Four

Today we had our second house party to celebrate the last day of first term classes.

Paolo invited a "few" people. Now, everybody expects intercultural misunderstandings in a place like China. But nobody would expect them to happen between yourself and your Italian flatmate...

To make a long story short: We ended up having more than 70 (in words: seventy) people in our flat. In fact, I almost started to worry about the static properties of the building structure.

Once the rush was gone, there just remained the four of us and a bottle of Whiskey. The more the bottle drained, the more philosophical the conversation got (at least judging from Dani, Plato must have been a chronic alcoholic!)

Towards the end of the bottle, we started to vow three things that we would change in the second term. I said I was going to study Chinese language more seriously. Unfortunately, I cannot remember my other two vows... too much Whiskey... But I'm confident that my unconcious self will see to proper fullfillment ;-)

Happy Birthday Matt

Today was my 38th birthday. Gosh... this sounds sooo much older than it feels!

I invited a small crowd to Simply Thai, an excellent Thai restaurant close to the school.

We had a great evening. My biggest birthday present, of course, had already been the definitive end to all financial statement analysis.

This itself would have been enough to make this a memoriable birthday already. But my dear friends couldn't just leave it at that and topped it with a bottle of 15 year old single malt whiskey. THANKS GUYS!!

(editor's note: less than one week after this, "the crowd" came for a visit at my apartment and took full advantage of me having whiskey around. The rest, they say, is history.)

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 :-))

Code of conduct

Last Friday, the entire student body of the 2007 intake has formulated its own unique code of conduct.

CEIBS CODE OF CONDUCT

1. Every student is a CEIBS ambassador and has the obligation to proudly represent the CEIBS community.
2. Show initiative and actively participate in CEIBS community by cooperating, helping and sharing.
3. Make learning enriching through healthy and constructive competition.
4. Be ethical and act with integrity at all times.
5. Be socially responsible and contribute to your community.
6. Respect students, teachers and school, accepting differences and promoting mutual understanding.
7. STUDY HARD, PARTY HARDER.

The comittee had actually aimed for eight items, as eight is the lucky number in Asia. However, they somehow got stuck after the seventh and my suggestion 8. Under all conditions always remember item 7 was not received with much enthusiasm...

Out of proportion

I don't mean to criticize, but some things in this Country simply seem to be out of proportion. See for yourself...

A dance club with a view

Yesterday night we went to Attica, a really cool club at the Bund.

There clearly were two distinct types of CEIBS students hanging out there: Those who wanted to celebrate the completion of their math exam and those who were trying to quickly forget (read "drown") their experience of said exam...

In any case, the club sports an outdoor terrace with a great view on Pudong and can be greatly recommended. The DJ in the R&B room absolutely knows his trade and never ever missed a beat!

Even though initially we had a bit of an argument with the front door person because we were a few minutes late and thus they wanted to charge us extra money, eventually we got to the manager who tried hard (and actually succeeded) in transforming us into happy customers who will certainly return there many times for the weekends to come...

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