This is not from personal experience

Busy Friday. It's the ESADE Finance Symposium and ESADE Open Day.  So you get this via Digg. To be honest I use "whatever" a lot too.
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Warm temperatures bring an absolute lack of motivation

I'll be honest with you. I've checked out mentally. The workload in Term 3 is significantly more than Term 2 and a bit more than Term 1. On top of that, I still have initiatives and deliverables for the Consulting Club and Benchmarking Task Force. Important items, but I'm struggling to get things done now that the weather is getting better and I actually have something to look forward to for the summer. My proposals to program management to cancel all classes and let us enjoy the rest of the term have gone unheeded. Damn them.

So what shall we talk about today?

Let's start off with some food stuff. 

The "Asians" got together for dinner one Friday night to congratulate a newly married couple and to say farewell to one my classmate's spouse. We went to La Paradeta near La Sagrada Familia. The concept is that you point at some seafood that you'd like prepared and then they cook it for you. Just in case you've eaten lead paint chips as a child they even have a nifty little diagram. 

Now that's a lean process. I feel like I'm gonna turn into those typical MBA graduates spouting all kinds of useless buzz words. Synergies! Cross functional development! Balanced Scorecard!

Anyways, it's pretty cool. Reminds me of the restaurants in Fisherman's Wharf in SF or King's Harbor in Redondo Beach. 

Would you like to see food? Well then onto to the seafood.....pictures.  

The food was quite delicious and most important to a starving MBA student, cheap.

The ESADE MBASA (MBA Student Association) held a town hall meeting outlining the various initiatives and plans for the upcoming year. They didn't need to entice people to attend but they did anyways by offering free food. Thank you MBASA. There's definitely a lot on MBASA's plate as they're an ambitious bunch but they've managed to get some awesome things put together and have gotten the ball rolling in cementing the school's status as a top tier B-school. Sometimes I feel like I'm at a start-up because the school basically let's us run with our ideas and supports us to some degree but we lack funding and resources to get everything going. Sole thing keeping everything from falling apart is our ambition and the thought that since we're essentially forever tied to ESADE to make the most of it.

April 23 was La Diada de St. Jordi or St. George's Day and we celebrated it Catalan style. I've never actually heard of the legend of St. George but apparently he was a bad-ass saint who slayed dragons and princesses, if you know what I mean. If you don't know what I mean, he killed dragons and wooed fair ladies with his mighty sword.  He was Catholic so it was all for show though. Anyways, in Catalunya women get roses and men get books because April 23rd is also National Book Day. 

Shakespeare and Cervantes died on April 23rd (Julian and Gregorian calendar April 23rd). Anyways, I heard two funny reasons as to why men get books. 

1. Only men are smart enough to read so that's why they get books. 
2. Women want men to get smarter so that's why they get books. 

Equally sexist. 

That piece of bread is just what they traditionally eat on St. Jordi Day. As with anything Catalan they had to remind us, through the use of Catalan flag motif, that it was a Catalan tradition. 

  

The afternoon of St. Jordi a couple of classmates and I went to this bar called MonVinic. Supposedly considered one of the top 5 wine bars in the world. To go along with that outrageous claim was this overkill of a "wine list". I guess it makes sense because of their ever changing wine list but it still seems douche-y. Kinda like personalized license plates on supercars. Because its a 200K car you can kinda justify it but at the same it's douchetastic. 

Today I had an Entrepreneurship brainstorming session. The brainstorming session was to come up with our innovative business idea that would be presented to the class. This presentation would essentially be our final exam and the business idea would carry forward for our next Entrepreneurship class. My teammate was kind enough to invite us over to his apartment, which had an amazing terrace. 

What happens when you combine 70 degree weather, beautiful outdoor terrace, beers, wine and other snacks?

A potentially awesome business plan.

I love it when a plan comes together

"Hello B,

I am pleased to formally offer you a Student Intern position with XXXX Bank!

Please find your offer letter attached indicating your start date of Monday, June 14, 2010. The offer letter covers the information we previously discussed and should further answer any questions you may have regarding your offer of employment."

Can't complain about a paid summer internship in LA in a company and unit I actually wanted to work for. Top it off, I get to spend some time with the SO, hang out with friends, and attend weddings. 

So the upcoming 9 months looks like 3 months in LA, 3 months in Barcelona, 3 months at Ross School of Business in Michigan. I like!

In the spirit of athletic competitions

Last weekend was the IESE Spring Games. IESE, ESADE, EADA, INSEAD and IE competed in a variety of sports over the course of three days. LBS was supposed to come but because of Eklasfluwoerfaljfya  or whatever that Icelandic volcano is called, they couldn't fly out. 

I don't have the breakdown of winners for each sport but ESADE won some and lost some. I was on the basketball team and I feel we would've done better if half our team didn't get horribly injured by the beginning of the second game. The IESE Spring Games was a huge wake-up call for us late 20's males. Actually the Sunday/Monday after the Spring Games was the wake-up call as we all hobbled around injured, sore and physically beat. I forgot how big of a gap there is in terms of intensity when you're practicing with your classmates versus competing with other teams. It's quite the rush to be on the court or field during game time but once you're off and your body tries to recover you realize that it's failing miserably to keep up. Good times though. I hate to laud our rival school but IESE did a great job in organizing the event and keeping it low cost. *ahem HEC-MBAT*. 

Anyways, in keeping with the theme of athletics, pictorial tour of the FC Barcelona vs. Valencia game I attended on March 14. Pictures courtesy of my NY New Year's Eve party organizer and classmate, OL. Are you ready for some football?

Glorious Camp Nou. A stadium steeped in history and Catalan spirit. With a maximum capacity of 98,000 fans, it is a behemoth of a stadium. We sat in the blue section about halfway up. Because the seats are right on top of each other, they've managed to keep all the seats within a fairly decent horizontal distance from the pitch. It's kinda like old Yankee Stadium. I'm sure that analogy was understood by like 1 of my readers. 

The sun setting over the stadium.

The first half was filled with a couple moments of excitement but it wasn't until the second half that Mr. Messi lit up the place with goal after goal after goal. That man is the best football player in the world right now. 

For El Clasico FC Barcelona versus Real Madrid, I ended up watching the game at a local bar with some classmates. After FC Barcelona dominated Real Madrid, we headed out to Plaza Catalunya since we heard that's where everyone went after a big win. Since beating Madrid is the ultimate uppercut to Spanish rule over Catalonia you can guess the chaos that ensued.

Las Ramblas was absolutely packed.

Being packed with people, the FCB fans decided it would be the perfect time to light firecrackers. I mean doesn't everyone love explosives especially when they're about 10 feet away from you. All this was done while people chanted Madrid se quema, se quema Madrid (burn Madrid burn). Catalans are crazy mf'ers.

Even the police thought so.

ESADE students kicking ass and taking names

While I waste my time blogging about random stuff, my classmates are going out and accomplishing things for ESADE. I have others news to release too but I've been put on hold until the official press release goes out on Friday. *Update: ESADE has been chosen as the 2nd European host of the Graduate Business Conference. Graduate Business Conference brings together top business leaders, political leaders and selected student government presidents and vice-presidents from the top 50 MBA Business Schools*

MBASA President and Vice President accepting the GBC hosting gig.





First, the ESADE team comprised of 1st Years Paul Fattinger, Paul Pick-Aluas, Andreas Boy Andresen and Hans A. Clement was awarded the $10,000 grand prize for their presentation on EuropaBio in this year’s Strategy World Cup.

The Strategy World Cup is an annual international case competition for graduate students organized by the Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and Graduate Student Consulting Group. The McDonough School, as one of the leading institutions in public policy, focused the competition on strategic business decisions in the light of current public policy issues.

This year, 29 teams from top business schools such as Columbia University and Dartmouth University, competed in the first round and submitted a case dealing with Daimler's strategic options given Opel’s bailout by the government of Germany. An independent jury evaluated the submissions and invited the top 5 teams for the final round held in Washington DC.

In the final round, the finalists from ESADE, Georgetown University, University of Maryland, Duke University and New York University had to prepare a case prompt on how EuropaBio, an institution representing international biotech companies, should react to new rules regarding the authorization of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) within the EU.

The results were presented to an international jury on Friday April 9th, 2010, who selected the ESADE team as the winner. Congrats to the four! *Now with pictures*

2) ESADE MBA Students Bas Van Ulden, Louise Ralston and Tanvi Salva made it to the final round of the Societe General Citizen Act competition based on designing a 'bank of tomorrow'. Down to the last 6 teams out of an original 181 teams from 27 countries! The last stage will be held in Paris on April 14th and 15th. Well done guys and best of luck!
Update 4/15: Just got word that the ESADE team won!! Congrats to Bas, Louise and Tanvi.














Update: 3) the ESADE team of Matthew Smith and Andreas Andresen were selected as the winners of the ESADE-IESE Adidas Case Competition. 6 teams from each school competed in the competition and the final presentations took place on April 14th. Congratulations to the both of them.














Seriously, this school is on a roll lately.

The Last Episode

After a craptacular week that involved a 5:30am night and various other MBA funness, this Saturday is quite spectacular. The weather's great, got a good 1.5 hours of basketball in and its El Clasico tonight (Barca vs. Real Madrid). To incorporate internet lingo, this Saturday is full of WIN. 

Post 1, 2 and 3 Anyways, to finally wrap up our trip to the French Riviera. The highlight of our last day was the trip to Île Sainte-Marguerite. The island made famous due to it housing Man in the Iron Mask. I totally thought it was a creation of Alexander Dumas but apparently the real prisoner was the inspiration for the book.

It was raining quite a bit in the morning and the SO's boots weren't as waterproof as initially expected. 

This looks like the perfect time to take a boat ride out to the island. 

Oh yeah. Totally safe. 

This is what I'm imaging is next. 

Fortunately, the waves weren't too bad and we made it to the island safely. The island houses a military fort, a couple of other buildings and a private estate of an Indian billionaire. The above picture is of the fort complex. 

They wouldn't let us take pictures of the inside of the prison so all you get is this picture of pottery. It's special pottery. Not because I said so but because it was brought up from a shipwrecked Roman boat off the coast of Cannes. 

Umbrellas are multipurpose. You can poke people with them, use them as a walking cane, create an entire pop song about them and use them to repel water. So useful. The  perfect storm was followed by sunshine and blue skies. Très bien.

Attached to the wall were pulleys, and I'm assuming ropes were attached to lower or raise stuff from something below those metal plates. Supposedly there was a dungeon in the prison so maybe it was used for nefarious activities. 

If I remember correctly, the prison cell housing The Man in the Iron Mask was the 2nd one from the left. Great view. Too bad about that iron mask thing. Oh and being incarcerated for 30+ years. 

The fort complex. Some of the buildings are used as hostels for schoolchildren so that they can spend a couple of days in the fort learning about stuff. When I was in elementary school we had Outdoor Science Camp so I'm assuming it's the same thing. Actually, we didn't go. We had the opportunity to go but our teacher was 80 years old and nixed the whole trip for our year because she was too freaking old to spend a week out in the wilderness. 

Well. No fresh water source on the island so all rainwater was collected. Nowadays they have a pipe running from the mainland. They aren't keeping it real. 

The prison. It looks like a happy place from afar. 

Landscaping is not a top priority within the fort. 

I took a picture of the cemetery.  I was hoping to get some paranormal activity captured but it didn't happen.....this time.

When the weather turned it really highlighted the beauty of the surrounding ocean. It almost looks tropical. 

Clear and shallow waters. 

Our flight left at 8:50pm so we had to head back to the mainland and get ourselves to the airport. 

Au revoir creepy prison island. 

Cannes. 

Our last dinner in France was at the airport restaurant. In the US this would've been 20 bucks. In France 10 euros. 

Look at that. Something healthy. That definitely offsets the 15 other 3 course meals that we had while in France. Uh huh. 

And......with that we conclude our trip to France. 

Merci France! We had a great time. 

Affectueusement,

SO and me. 

Don't worry we're nearing the end

You must be all wondering how many posts I'm going to dedicate to our trip. Well, have no fear we are nearing the end. I promise two more posts and we'll get back to the more exciting topics of being an ESADE student. Aren't you excited? Posts 1 and 2 if you want to read from the beginning.  

So our initial plan for the day after Monaco was to head down to Cannes but due to the French deciding that it wasn't necessary to run trains that Sunday, we got stuck in Nice. Not a big deal. We still had more places to visit. So off we went to our first stop, the Musee et Site Archeologiques de Cimiez. I won't bother translating that for everyone. 

Anyways, typical of any large city in Europe, Roman ruins were found in Cimiez. *Boring history stuff ahead* Nice has a long history of settlement, dating back to the period of the  "Archaic Homo Sapiens" (400,000 years ago). Nice, itself, was founded as a Greek settlement and became an important trading post for the Greeks.  The Roman town of Cemenelum was considered a rival to the Greek city and Cemenelum's ruins are located in the area of Cimiez.*End of boring history stuff*

The Museum's selling point is the ruins. The ruins we saw were what was formerly a bathhouse and a temple. 

Roman bathrooms. No partitions so you're getting real friendly with your Roman buddies. You could basically high five the guy next to you after a particularly good bowel movement. 

Portion of the underground water system. I'm always impressed by Roman engineering. It's mind bottling how they had all this figured out 2000 years ago. 

After checking out the ruins we stopped by the Musee Matisse to check out some of his artwork and sculpture pieces. This was a morning of culture. 

There was a festival going on in the park so we stopped by and checked out the street fair that was going on. 

The SO wanted to get this Nicoise specialty called Sooca. It's essentially a chickpea crepe. I can only describe it as burnt crepe. 

After a good couple of days of walking around and sightseeing we wanted to use this day to take it easy so we did. Pretty much all we did that day were those two sights. 

Of course we still ate a big meal to offset those calories burnt. Ginormous plate of antipasti.

Huge bowl of seafood pasta. 

And, of course, dessert. This was actually tiramisu. I've never seen it prepared this way but the SO told me that she's had it prepared this way before when she was in Tuscany. Must be some Mediterranean thing. 

The French transportation department decided that they've had enough time off and got the trains up and running again so it was off to Cannes. 

It's currently a blue carpet but change it to red and you'll recognize this place as the Cannes Grand Auditorium. Stars have walked on this stairway. Oooh.

What it looks like during the actual festival. The Cannes Film Festival this year will take place May 12-23rd this year. If you're a wealthy socialite you could watch F1 in Monaco and then head over to partake in the festivities in Cannes. 

The Cannes Walk of "Fame". I think his nose is the more well known than his films.

La Croisette. 

Decided to have a sandwich for lunch. Sat on the boardwalk and just enjoyed the good weather. 

On our way to the ferry to St. Margerite we came across these mega-yachts. I've never really seen yachts this big up close but immediately I wanted one. This particular one was about 150 feet. Now, I'm thinking this costs about 3-5 million USD. No, when you get to the 150 ft.+ range of yachts they're about 15-45 million USD. Dreams crushed. So, maybe owning one is totally unfeasible but who's to say I won't be able to find a friend who ends up with one of these. That's more likely. If I ever do get to set foot on these things the first thing I'm gonna do is sing this song. 

I'm on a boat bitches!!

Because there's not much to do in Cannes we were then off to Grasse, the perfume center of Europe.

The town of Grasse is very...umm...working class.

The old city was still very quaint and nice though.

Our first stop, Fragonard. High end perfumerie. They had a free factory tour. It was free to get in but you ended up spending way more than what the tour actually costs thanks to the strategically placed boutique store at the end of the tour.

Smelling the filters. It smelled perfume-y.

Fragonard sources their raw materials from all across the globe.

Everything is still all hand-made at Fragonard. Hence, the extremely high prices for their perfumes.

Old school preparation process. They would continually replace those flowers until the scent of the flowers would be infused into the fat. To just make the essense is labor intensive. 1 ton of roses only yields about 4 pounds of essence.

Fragonard also makes soaps.

Easter bunny not included. You'd think they'd include the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy for how much these things cost.

Where the Nose sits. The Nose is the expert that actually creates the perfume. They have specialty schools in France if you want to become a Nose but you also have to abstain from smoking, drinking and spicy foods. Yeah, no thanks.

Old school perfume seller. Why he doesn't just set up a small shop, I don't know. I mean is it really worth the savings in cost when you have to be a kitchen shelf?

The absolute highlight of our time in Grasse was the Perfume Museum. The thing was like 5 levels and just gigantic. Our guidebook barely mentioned the place but it was honestly spectacular. Well curated and tons of cool exhibits. Highly recommend it.

French graffiti, Not too shabby.

We had dinner in Cannes. It was a French/Arabic food place so it was nice to get something that didn't taste like the typical southern French cooking. I believe that's the 4 meat platter. Guess who got that one. If you said the SO then you win. What do you win? Just the end of this post. Congrats on making it this far.