China trip

The P3 break!

My Chinese group mate Yuxin had invited us to come and experience China over the break. With a mixture of a few Brazilians, an American, a Brit, Yuxin and myself, we took a 7 o’clock flight to China for a packed, intense, and fantastic 8-day trip to Shanghai, Xi’an, and Beijing.

The main format of the trip was perfectly in line with INSEAD tradition “culture, action, friends, food, party, no sleep.” Fresh out of the plane we discovered that China in early March did not have the same temperature as Singapore… it was freezing! In Shanghai we went sightseeing, got to know this hypermodern city, joined Yuxin’s wife Ming for dinners at famous and typical Shanghai restaurants, had drinks at trendy places on the Bund, and cool bars in the Concessions, and went to some great tourist sights around Shanghai.

And we had food…

I won’t keep on writing how great the food was (just this paragraph) but every meal in China was completely awesome, and I could write stories about every meal. Each lunch or dinner was completely different to the others, which added to the appreciation of the size and diversity of this country! Whether Mongolian, Shanghainese, Muslim, or very local and typical from whatever region, we loved the variety of food, smells, spices, colours, and tastes. Don’t get me wrong, Chinese food in Holland tastes good, but after having been to China I know that it’s not close to what you can get over here. Apart from that: every Chinese meal is a social event with loads of Pijiu's and Chinese wine - which truly has nothing to do with wine but everything with spirits like vodka, tequila or jenever… Gan bei!

After Shanghai we went to breathtaking Xi’an… terracotta warriors, impressive tomb sites, old city walls, serene Buddhist temples, a missile launch site, a hotel complex fit for presidents and kings, and many late drinks with friends. Everywhere we ended up haggling, negotiating, eating, drinking and enjoying what this beautiful country has to offer.

We were quickly accustomed to do our sleeping in the minibuses, during the small stretches between sights, cities, villages, bars, clubs and restaurants. From Xi’an we flew to Beijing for more food, good clubs, Tiān'ānmén square, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, cheap Prada and Louis Vuitton, the birds'nest, the CCTV tower, karaoke at massive KTVs, dinners at 8 story restaurants, taxi rides without any means of communication, being lost, being the only foreigners in some places, being moviestars on pictures with teenagers, and constantly marveling at so much cultural richness...

Our China trip... Thanks again Yuxin and Ming, for what was truly the best possible introduction to China I can imagine, shie-shie!

P3 Final Exams

Just back from Palau, I faced a week full of P3 projects coming to an end, busy negotiations building up to the Nego exam, visits to the Chinese embassy to arrange my visa and exam preparations.

End of Feb meant the end of core class exams, so apart from the elective finals; on the 25th I also had an exam for Macro from 0900 to 1200, and one for Politics from 1400 to 1700. It was a long day of writing about theories, volatility, realists, war rhetorics, monetary policy, and all wrapped in essays around what would I do, how do I think the world problems should be solved, what theory do I use to explain my thought process, and what makes me think it will work, etc...

After that we had the customary end of party drinks, saying goodbye’s to our friends who went back for P4 in Fonty, and packing my bags for a very early morning flight to China the next morning.

Diving trip to Palau

So we planned the trip...

A bit outrageous, but the incredible chance to dive off the beautiful islands of Micronesia, in more detail the light blue waters surrounding the island of Palau in the middle of the Pacific.



Wednesday February 6, first I had Macroeconomics and Politics, then I raced to Changi airport to catch my afternoon SQ flight to the Philippines. In Manila I was welcomed by Angela who had booked the morning flight to meet up with our friend Tjerk, who flew in directly from Amsterdam, to join us on yet another diving adventure around the world. After the tiring procedures in Manila, we were joined by classmates Etienne and Christine, and the DIVE Palau team boarded the evening flight to Koror.

The next morning a minivan picked us up for a short drive to the dive school. After the regular admin stuff, forms completion, log checks and stuff, we unpacked our stuff, had a quick breakfast and set of for our first dive. This would pretty much be the daily routine for the trip: up early in the morning, load stuff in boat, sail to dive site, and make 2 or 3 dives interrupted by lunch on an empty small bounty island...

First dive was to the Iro wreck, a sunk Japanese 2nd world war freighter at 29m. Not a bad impression for the first dive with regular air. All the subsequent dives we got free NITROX (thanks to Etienne’s commitment to please Negotiation prof Horacio by turning each and every opportunity of trade into a bloody and tough negotiation exercise)

We dove at sites with promising names like Blue Corner, Clarence Wall, Fantasy, we did a fantastic cave dive in Chandelier Cave, my favourite night dive to Jake’s Seaplane, and got treated to an abundance of sharks at the many drop offs. On my favourite shark dive, we hung to our reef hooks at the cliff of a drop off, and while we were in the middle of one of those large circles of big barracudas, we were treated to a friendly visit from a large patrol of 2m black tip sharks. Sometimes life can be really good!

We did our last dive in the German Channel, famous for it’s cleaning stations where often large Mantas come for a scrub and occasionally huge sharks come to enjoy the spa like massage currents of the channel. Too bad that on this last dive our guide dropped us at the downstream point of the cleaning stations. There was a lot of awesome shark activity, but due to the massive current, we could do little more than hang tight, before being swept away by heavy currents and doing our 3m stop racing past our surroundings before being picked up by our boat.

Great dives, an amazing snorkelling trip to the famous jellyfish lake (where you are literally engulfed by millions of non-stinging jellyfish,) good company and apart from one annoying occasion of food poisoning, good food.

The DIVE Palau team returned happy and satisfied

Privileged

I realized in P3 that we are privileged people.

We did nice things in the past, had good careers, etc.. but we are very fortunate that we can attend a business school of such a reputation and quality as INSEAD. It's great and truly enriching to study amongst great people, and to meet so many inspiring characters.

When do you get the chance to meet Ambassadors, Foreign Policy Secretaries, CEOs of successful companies, serial entrepreneurs, and TV personalities to discuss with them how they do business, how you would have handled some situations they went through, how international relations impact business, how you think about world politics and learn from those successful people who have done it, are living it, or will have to do it in the near future...

Will you do too? And how about myself? And how will we do it then? How will it impact business, society, or just our own lives and those of our families and friends...? And how will others judge what you do and did? Maybe more important to learn is how can you influence all that in a positive way?

Still so much to learn...

P3 Academics

I very much enjoyed P3, with great professors like:

Ilian Mihov, the master of Macro Economics who would in my opinion not have allowed the US economy to tank like it has, had he had any chance to stop it,

Ethan Kapstein who showed us very antagonistic views on international relations and brought a large number of interesting and influential speakers to his International Politics class,

Michael Witt, the German professor with his Singlish phrases, and Japanese and Chinese language skills who managed to stun even the Koreans and Chinese classmates with his vast knowledge of Asia, during the Strategies for Asia course,

Phil Anderson, who ran a very cool entrepreneurship class with fantastic guests and great cases in his Venture Opportunities class, and

Horacio Falcao, who got the stage 3 times a week to perform his Negotiations show for our pleasure and training. Apart from his lectures I just loved the confrontational assignments where you actually negotiate in all kinds of situations with your classmates. It got emotional, it got messy, and we aimed for larger pies than any oven could possibly bake.

It was a great mix of classes for me topped off with the chance to work with my fantastic IDFP group on our successful project for PASI in Malawi. It was a good learning opportunity for us, and a chance to show our resilience after having had to stop with our project in Kenya due to the extreme, and incredible violence that disrupted all life, civilized business and society especially in the Kisumu area where our client was located.

Thanks Begoña, Ceci, Nadia, and Steven for all the good times!

Promises, promises

Dear readers,

I'm aware of the fact that I promised to post sooner than this, but I have unfortunately not managed to keep it up. Seriously wondering whether there are still any readers left, I have nevertheless decided to post some experiences and stories from the past few months. Hence, going forward you will first get some past experiences, travels, what-we've-been-up-to's and only after we finnished catching up will we move on with the more recent events.

As a short update: I graduated with my class on the 3d of July in Fontainebleau (so I'm now officially a proud MBA of the class of July 2008) and we have moved back to Singapore where I am now looking for a job.

I already miss the MBA, my classmates, and life in the bubble... be it on the Fonty campus or on the Sing one. This year was totally crazy, hyperfast paced, dynamic as hell, constantly stimulating, and as fun as can be... man, did I love and enjoy my year at INSEAD!!!

Angela is also back to work in Singapore (with an occasional business trip to Shanghai or Jakarta.)

I got to go now, but will start posting our past journeys soon.

All the best to you all J'08s... and when in Singapore, do let me know, there's a bunch of us out here!

Formula 1 in Sepang

Soon I will post a story about a fantastic weekend in Kuala Lumpur!

Academics and other stuff in P4

This period the pressure is all on “job preparation & job hunting.” Every night 2 recruiting companies on campus, invitations for interviews, dinners, coffee chats, informal calls... but also an endless stream of application lettres writing, interview preparation, networking and DINGs (rejections)...

This is P4!

Apart from the job search, this period I am looking at the possibility of buying a company with a few classmates. We are currently exploring an opportunity in Europe for a management buyout of a metal production company with a revenue base of € 1-2M. It’s still exploration, so we have to figure out whether we can fix some of the issues in the company and whether we think that we are the people who can add most value to the firm. REP is a very nice elective! The whole idea of seriously thinking about going out there to buy a € 3M company without having any money, is new to me. Who knows where this will lead us to...

At the same time I’m still busy with my international development project. After the nightmare of the elections in Kenya, we bundled our energy to help a paralegal institute in Malawi. This is proving to be a very interesting case with a real brainteaser: “how can you make money, when all your clients are poor, when you cannot go after wealthier clients, and when your aid is stopped?”

My favourite class this period is Economics and Management in Developing Countries by Daniel Traca. This is the world of IMF and Worldbank, Multinationals and politics, Oil in Chad and Sudan, Aid, the failure of Aid, and ‘what if you’re in the shoes of a president from a developing nation’

So that’s for the academics.

Luckily, we still have time to unwind. After all, the motto at INSEAD still is “work hard, play hard” so we make sure to escape the bubble every now and then.

Highlights that I’ll describe in separate posts:
- Scuba Diving in Palau (Micronesia)
- Trip to China in the break
- Formula 1 in Sepang

After the silence

... so what have we been up to in the last few months?

I’ve not been the most faithful blogger, that’s for sure! For this I apologize,deeply. I guess that since the trip to HK at the end of January, I got caught up in all the projects and group work as well as all my classes, and electives...

Period 3:

We all thought that after P2, P3 in Singapore was going to be a breeze... nothing could have been further away from the truth, though! The workload again was huge and what really made life hard was the constant effort to align our schedules around groupwork. Everybody had different classes, so it was virtually impossible to meet as a group before 2100h... and I was in at least 5 different groups.

Some of my projects:
- A Market entry of a luxury champagne brand in Singapore
- Paralegals in Malawi
- A Management analysis of a maturing startup from Spain
- Analysis of an online travel agency’s options & recommendation
- A Zillion case writeups and studies

What really was wonderful in P3, was the temperature. Walking to school in the evening, jumping into the pool, having a bite at one of the hawker stalls...

Life in Singapore is good!

Weekend in Hong Kong

This weekend we stayed in Singapore and just relaxed. Last weekend we went to Hong Kong.


An old friend of Omar (Dave) was visiting family and friends at that time, and we decided to meet up with him. Dave introduced us to some friends who live in Hong Kong, and he also showed us around Kowloon on Saturday. I took Friday off to go early and had a flight at 8 in the morning. To my surprise I could share a taxi to the airport with Jason, with whom we had spent NewYears eve in Bangkok. He was also on his way to Hong Kong, but only as a stopover on his way back to Canada. My journey took about 4 hours, his 25!!

My first impression of Hong Kong was that it had changed compared to two years ago. The city looked even more modern and cleaner than I remembered it. Just until I stepped out of the MTR and went searching for our hotel. I had booked a hotel on Hong Kong Island because we both wanted to experience HK from the other side (we stayed in Kowloon last time.) The hotel was close to Sheung Wan, an area I found out later that resembles most to old HK. It looked very much like Kowloon with all the small shops, dried products (smelly dried fish) and butcheries selling fresh meat on the streets. Luckily our hotel (Novotel Century Harbourview) was extremely modern and our room on the 20th floor had recently been refurbished and modernized. This was one of the hippest hotelrooms we had ever had, overlooking the harbour with all its activity.

After I checked in, I walked up the hill to the University of Hong Kong. The campus is big and because many buildings are at a different height there are steps and escalators everywhere. All university buildings are scattered around the place, and are on top of a hill... I saw many non-chinese faces at HKU, which correspond with the brochure. My reason for visiting HKU was the MSc in Finance. I may be very interested in pursuing a Master degree in Finance, and HK has a good one. I spoke to some of the faculty members and they were all very nice.

Omar arrived after his classes on a comfortable Singapore Airlines flight... he was so positive about SingAir, that I think he is never going to fly anything else anymore...


Friday evening we met with Dave and his fiends in the Dragon-I (read dragon eye) currently the place to go in HK. It's a Japanese-Chinese fusion restaurant until about 23h, when it transforms into a trendy and fashionable club-bar. They played a lot of music from the 90ies and we had good fun. Dave’s friends were very nice, so it was great to meet them. Dave stayed with his friends Emily & Frederic. Emily is Dutch and has lived in HK for about 7 years now, Frederic is Belgian. His other friends were from HK, France and the US, and they all have been living in HK for several years now.

On Saturday Omar and I went shopping. This is very easy considering the fact that you have to divide the price by roughly 11 to convert to euro's and then you end up with a figure that makes you say “sold”! Especially when you think of how much everything costs back home in NL. In the afternoon Dave took us to Mong Kok. We started the afternoon in a place where many locals go for a healthy snack. We could choose between jelly with icecream, jelly with birdsnest saliva or jelly with fruit. It tasted good and was a fun experience. We had dinner in a nice small noisy place, where we had a great selection of dishes, both vegetarian, full of fish, meat and lots of peppers.

HK is an amazing place. Omar loves it. Even though I personally prefer Singapore, I also liked it and I was glad that it was a lot cleaner and prettier than I remembered it. Who knows, we might decide to live here at some point in the future.

Singapore is great!

Classes in P3 are amazing. 

"Venture Opportunities" is so interesting and challenging that you wish you had more time to spend on this elective. 

"Negotiations" is fun, very active, and you can already see how much you will learn. 

"Intl Politics" is taught by one of the best professors in the field, and the course is full of controversial topics and debate. 

For the "Intl Development Project" I'm going to work on a very exciting project in Kenya. I seriously hope that the tension in Kenya quites down quickly. Could politicians for once act in the benefit of their country?? The story of Africa should not always be painted with violence and blood, but it's so sad that it's so often the case... why???

This week I will also get my first class of "Strategies for Asia PAC" and I will officially start with"Macro-economics." I look forward to both.

On another note: A warm welcome to all the new P1's!!! have a great time in either Fonty or Singa! (I can't believe we are the senior class already...) 

To everybody back in Fonty: we miss you guys! Take care and have fun!!!

Singapore

The 2nd of January marked the start of my 6 month contract in Singapore, and was my first working day after having had a 4.5 month holiday. I think the fact that I had worked in Singapore before in 2005 and that I new the MRT, and how to get there made it easy to start working again. The office has not changed much except for the people. There were many new faces, also in audit where I work. Outside of the office the street has also changed; some of the little restaurants in Robinson Road have changed names, Lau Pah Sat had a refurbishment and looks more modern than 2 years ago, and next to where I work they took down a large building and are busy with the construction of a new one.

While I was working Omar spent his last days before the start of P3 at the “Club Med” type pool of our new apartment, occasionally he moved to unpack our suitcases, and thought about what to put on shopping lists. At the moment of writing (7th of January) Omar just finished his first day of P3 and he is very enthusiastic. He started off with Politics and he likes his new professor and the course material. This evening there were already some parties and get togethers with the Singaporeans, however I decided to stay at home (I already call it home after 1 week ☺) do some reading and go to bed early. I am so tired every evening, apparently I'm not completely used to working 8 hours a day anymore...

Omar, well he went to have a quick drink in the other tower, and will later on prepare his 2 classes for tomorrow. The weather is fantastic, nice, warm, so life is good here in Singapore…

Bangkok & New Year's Eve

Our stay at home was short, but we had a great time with friends and family.

After exactly one week it was time to pack our bags again for our flights to Asia. By now a week has passed since we arrived in Singapore. Well, technically we arrived on Saturday the 30th of December but we stayed only 2 hours because we took a direct flight to Bangkok to celebrate New Years Eve with Insead friends Li Ran, Anita, Alex, Steven, Ken and Jason.

The 31st we spent the day being tourists, sightseeing Bangkok. We visited the Royal Palace, the Laying Buddha at Pranon Wat Pho and we took a boatride on the river. In the evening we ate delicious Thai food after which we went to the Latitude bar on the Banyan Tree hotel. The view from the 52nd floor was beautiful, you could see all over Bangkok. The fireworks however, were a bit low key in the opinion of many people. We had expected that big fireworks would erupt as soon as the new year would kick in but the first fireworks started about ten minutes before 12 and they were so dispersed that it actually looked rather small. The ambience, view and music at Latitude more than made up for this though!


The first day of 2008 we had our first Thai massage. It was an interesting and sometimes painful but also very vitalizing experience. Especially when the masseuses sat on your back and used their elbows to work on your cramped muscles.
We enjoyed Bangkok and the great hospitality of Li Ran, Ken and his parents, and we would have liked to stay a little longer. However… Singapore was calling, so we kindly boarded our Air Asia flight towards Changi airport.