Spring Fling

This past weekend was spent in the lovely city of Barcelona. It was quite a shock for a number of reasons. One of them was the fact that all the signs were in Catalan as opposed to Spanish.

By the way, there are several languages spoken in Spain. Catalan, Basque, and Galician are some of the others. So no one in Spain speaks Spanish. They speak Castellano (what everyone else calls Spanish, which is from Castille) and some other language, usually.

Anyway, this was somewhat disconcerting as Catalan is different enough to be unintelligible to an English/Spanish-only speaker. (Although for me, Spanish-speaker is rather generous!)

We came to compete in the annual Spring Fling MBA Tournament with several other schools in Europe. It is hosted by IESE, which is in Barcelona. I was able to meet people from ISEAD, ESADE, HEC, and a host of others. All I can say is "WOW." They are not like us and we are not like them...

It's strange to see people living the same MBA fantasy life that we are and how different that experience is for them relative to us. I know I chose the right school!

As for the tournament, we participated. I was in the Tug-of-War competition, we ended second overall in that event. In the picture is where the Tournament took place. It was in the Parque Montjuic (imagine an umluat over the "i"), the site of the 1992 Summer Olympics. I thought this needle was quite impressive. From the picture you can really get a sense of the scale fo this place, enormous. There's a little bit of the city in the far background.

We, or more properly my roommate Ulrike, drove the 6 hours to a fro. I suspected I would get sick from this trip, but it did happen until Thursday. So I'm taking this opportunity to blog about my adventures whilest I recuperate. Stay tuned for more!!

r_m Instituto de Empresa current student Madrid

I'm Here to Study?

One of the advantages of living in a city like Madrid is some of the coolest things on earth happen here.

My buddies Guillermo, Esteban, and I went to a PlayboyTV event on Wednesday last week. They had been building this thing up for about a week so the pressure to go was building. I typically don't like to go out before Thursday, but as I came home from the gym that night, all I could think was, "Are you crazy, you need to see this!" So there we were waiting for the show to start. In typical Madrid fashion, things started late, around 1AM. We were there at midnight so we took our places right next to the stage.
As the show was going, there were many thoughts going through my mind. One of them was, "I came to Madrid to study??" Needless to say, after the show we left. Mainly because the male to female ratio was extremely bad!