Merry Christmas everyone!!

The end of 2007 is nearing! P1 and P2 are over, the P2 exams are done, we cleared out of our room in Villa Foch, we had a bunch of goodbye parties in Fonty, and we're home for Christmas.

The anticipation of going to Singapore is fantastic, we so much look forward to the nice weather, the Asian friendliness, the great food, and the many fun weekend trips that I know we will do. Oh, another positive element is that Angela will be able to work in Singapore. Having a holiday break was good fun, but going back to work in Singapore, together with nice colleagues that you haven't seen for a while is also great.

Leaving Fonty was very strange though. It was sad to pack our bags and to realize that P1 and P2, the core part of the programme, is over. Why was this sad? well, mainly because some people will not go to Singapore, but will stay in Fonty. We had a great time in spite of the massive workload and we will miss the friends who stay behind. Good job there is skype and that we may even work together on projects. So cheers to all you friends staying in Fonty, have a great time!!

Now moving on, our week at home is great but short. We get to see many friends and spend time with family, but time flies so fast that we already have to start thinking about packing and about our preparation for life in Asia. Thanks to Qantas, we won't be able to carry much stuff in the airplane, so at least that makes life easier in terms of packing...

As far as our short term planning is concerned:

- 29th DEC flight to Singapore
- 30th DEC flight to Bangkok for New Year's Eve celebration with classmates
- 1st JAN back to Singapore
- 2nd JAN Angela starts working
- 7th JAN Omar starts P3

Our Bangkok trip will be a short, packed, party stay. We are contemplating a day of sightseeing in Bangkok, followed by a massage to get ready for the night, Thai dinner, NYE at a cool rooftop bar like Sirocco, or Banyan, and finish off the night with trendy clubbing at the Bed supper club.

All the best for your breaks, Christmas and NYE parties, our best wishes for 2008, and may the friendly little Christmas elves bring you lots of nice presents!! MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Skyrocketing forward in time

Unbelievable, P2 is almost over. As I'm studying Finance, Accounting and maybe later tonight, ehm this morning, ehm whatever, POM, I realize that tomorrow will be my last day of class in Fontainebleau for a while and maybe forever!!!?!

Wednesday we'll have a day off so we can study... but Thursday the P2 exams will start. This period has been insane. The amount of casework, group assignments, readings, and lectures has been huge and the pace has been outrageaous. I feel like if I'm piloting a rocket heading towards planet earth at Mach2, as I'm trying to aim it in the right direction and figure out how you're supposed to land the damned thing at the same time... no kidding folks, "this is your captain speaking, it's going to be a pretty hard landing... you better brace, say your hail mary's, and get ready for a magnetic welcome to gravity!"

On the other side of the tunnel though... there will be a few days to recover and say goodbye to the classmates who stay behind, a party to say goodbye to the graduating class, Christmas at home with family, New Year's eve in Bangkok, and then P3 and further in Singapore.

I'm so excited about my classes for P3:
- International Politics
- Macro Economics
- Strategies for Asia Pacific
- Negotiations
- Venture Opportunities and Business Models (VOBM)
- International Development Field Project

Today we had a heads up on the to be defined field projects. There are a few challenging opportunities for this elective to show what we learned and are capable of. The elective is actually a real project for a local NGO to help them with a current business opportunity or problem. From the reading I'm quite enthousiastic about a potential project for an agricultural cooperative in Uganda, where we may help by doing an analysis and a plan to try to improve the operations. Another project I'm quite interested in is in South India. Here we will create a business plan and an expansion strategy for an organisation that promotes self-help communities, and provides microfinance, focusing on women and families.

VOBM will be awesome and will be my introduction to venture spotting, an additional track I'm planning to learn more about for potential future opportunities. Not from a Private Equity analyst point of view, but maybe from the point of view of a potential manager who considers taking over a company to own and manage it.

From a career development perspective, I've talked to many classmates from different industries and I've decided to learn more about Oil&Gas. I believe that there may be many tremendously challenging opportunities in de Petrochemical sector, so I want to learn more about the upstream processes of exploration and drilling

More later...

Russian Party

The notorious Russian Party… Instead of hosting a national Russian week, the Russians organized a whole day filled with Russian culture. In the morning everybody could enjoy blini’s with salmon caviar, meat or cheese, during the day there was Russian music played in the bar area, in the late afternoon there were even Russian movies, and at 10pm we had the fantastic party.
The party was great and the organization (amongst others housemates Irina and Timur) did a fantastic job!! The beautiful chateau that also hosted the Bain party was lighted purple, we were greeted by dancers and trays full of vodka. Inside there was champagne, followed by more vodka with either coke, orange juice or straight up. Stolichnaya animated the event with a busload of blond girls who walked around with trays of vodka or even bottles of vodka all night, to make sure all glasses were constantly filled. Besides a mix of music (Russian, Indian, 80ies, pop etc) we were entertained by two stage dancers, a fantastic ballet, and even President Vladimir Putin who came all the way from Moscow to comment on the Russian – French relations. So, thanks to the Russians who treated us to a great party! We can only look forward to repeat this event somewhere next year in Moscow!!

Paris social life

We had another Dutch delegation visiting Fontainebleau shortly after my uncle’s trip. My sister Jolanda and her boyfriend Patrick arrived closely followed by 4 dear friends Sidney, MarLoes, Govert and Marcella. We spent the afternoon eating crepes and visiting the shops of Fontainebleau. For the evening we decided to take advantage of the fact that Paris is only an hour away, so we went to Alcazar. Omar and I got to know this place through our housemate Li Ran who is an expert on trendy places. Alcazar is a club restaurant, where after 10pm the upper gallery transforms in a lounge-bar with live music. We had a nice round table, a waiter who scraped the breadcrumbs off the table, and very good food. And then there was the dessert…

[a moment of silence so the writer can enjoy the memory of applecrumble with vanilla ice cream and chocolat mousse...]



The next day we showed everybody around Insead and had lunch before they left back Holland. It is great to share weekends with friends from back home. A few weeks later we also had lunch with Jeroen, Marieke & Elin who came to France to visit us and Mickey Mouse. Initially we planned to join them for a day in EuroDisney, but sadly Omar’s grandmother died the week before, so we went back home to be with our families.

Nature calling

A few weekends ago we welcomed my uncle Henk and his girlfriend Jeannette in Fontainebleau. They booked a weekend to Paris and visited us in Fontainebleau. This was a good opportunity to explore a little bit of Fontainebleau’s famous forest. There are many places to park your car and start walking or cycling and we took one of them close to one of the spots overlooking the gorge. There is a long line of big stones (boulders) lying in the forest and besides climbing the boulders one can also hike through the forest to walk trough the gorge.

Our petite hike started by following the yellow signs until we lost them and followed the blue signs. Because it was in the afternoon and it was getting dark we decided to make a shortcut and walked back to the car. Next we went on a quest for the 10-meter boulder Omar claimed to have seen. After searching for this big stone in the ‘boulder park’ alongside the N7 we concluded that some of these boulders indeed get big and reach almost 10 meter. It was very nice to go into the forest and I realized that we should do it more often.

After having been in Fontainebleau for almost 4 months we had not seen any wild animals. Before coming to Insead we read on the blogs and in the Partner guide that boars and deer can be frequently spotted and that people should be careful when driving home at night since accidents happen frequently between boars and cars.
Many of Omar’s classmates told us that they see boars, deer and rabbits often, but every time we drove at night we did not see any, until we went to Montigny sur Loing for a Dutch party. After having eaten ‘Boerenkool met Hemaworst en spekjes’ we drove back to Fontainebleau when we spotted some boars next to the road doing what they always do, sticking their nose in the mud. We saw some more crossing the road and we were very happy. Our first Boars!! A week later we saw a doe standing in the forest next to the road. She just looked at us and we realized that this is one of the things that makes living in Fontainebleau so beautiful, being so close to the forest and the animals that you can actually see them in the wild where they belong. 

Back online!

As many of you may have noticed, and some of you kindly reminded us, we have been offline too long... sorry about that!

In my last post I defied the professors to show us how tough they are. Foolish me quickly discovered that they had prepared a lot for us to chew on, and even more for us to digest... the pace in P2 was extremely high, since day one. P1 was very very busy, P2 is almost over but was extreme. We will post a few short stories to give you a heads up of what's happened in Fonty.