Cool school

This school kicks ass! VSE is shit compared to HEC. They have some many activities, over 100 student clubs, very good relationships with companies, getting an internship  is a matter of a couple of clicks on the intranet, the professors seem to be experts in their field etc etc etc, i could go on all day. I would need at least one year to exploit most of the possibilities that I'm offered.
Other good news, we're going to get 500EUR for the business project. SWEET!
They also have a huge sports area, with a rygby, 2 football, tennis and god knows what other fields, a lake with a couple of bridges, a man-made waterfall...

It's amazing!

Today the agenda was quite boring, we were told how the school functions and how to take advantage of the numerous resources at the library. BNP Paribas did bring a couple of champagnes, but they didn't really promise anything, so I don't who I'll open an account with. They also "stole" the last bottle and took it home with them. Bastards;-)

Oh, I picked my courses today. I'll be taking a "Management and social behaviour" course; another one called "Network Economy" and another called "Energy and Finance". I also have to choose a businnes project before tomorrow afternoon. It's a tough decision, because we don't have a lot of specific information, but I'll let you know when I decide.

We drank again tonight, just came back from Sonia's room and from Zinc, one of the local bars. It wasn't too bad, we had many a laugh with Tom again;-) But I'm looking forward tio the Thursday party. I luckily don't have any courses in Friday, so it should be good.

Ok, my eyes are sore, gotta get some sleep.

Have a good one everyone!!!!!!!!!!

Another day gone...

So we (Honza, Tom and Gabor) just finished two bottles of cheap-yet-excellent red wine and I'm going to get some sleep.  In the morning the official bullshit is starting, we'll decide which courses to take and in the afternoon BNP Paribas is bringing cases of champagne, to get us drunk and make us open accounts with them...:-)

Good night

First days

Friday night was a small get-together party in a snail-shaped church/chapel here on campus. It was my first time getting drunk in a holy place, surround by books like "Catechisme":-) There were around 15-16 of us, everyone brought their local alcohol and there were some refreshments. I didn't get a chance to talk to everybody, but the one's I did talk to seemed like ok people. There's Igor, a Spanish speaking Japanese guy from Brazil guy; two girls from London one of whom is Kate(I think); there's Gabor and Ditta from Hungary, Kay and two girls from Norway and...I'm terrible wwith names. There's thos guy Tom from Dublin who I think I'll be good friends with, he's got my sense of humor and is relaxed and easy-going...

Yesterday I went on a little sightseeing trip with Honza's parents and his brother. They are a family straight out of a Czech movie. Dad is a bussiness-man with a typical sense of humor, mom is always worried and the son is bored:-) They were very nice to me, didn't let me pay for meals, so I'm going to pay for Honza's beers I guess:-) We strolled around Pigalle and Montmarte and then around Champs-Elysees and La Defense. I've never been to La Defense before and was impressed, it's a very nice business-centre, and the Grande Arche is really amazing. Too bad the weather was crap so I couldn't take better pictures. We came back after getting a bit lost in Versailles at around 9 (I think), had dinner at a achinese restauarant (ever eaten frog legs in a chinese restaurant??:-). At around midnight my friend Tom called, and we had some drinks in Sonia's place with Christoph (a crazy German studying in Ireland) and another French guy whose name I don't remember. We tried to watch a movie, Domino, but since the sound quality was bad and it was getting close to 5 a.m., we fell asleep before the first half of the movie was over.

I woke up at noon today to get lunch in the cafeteria. There's a nice choice of all kinds of stuff to eat (including avocado with shrimp, yum) and you don't pay too much; in fact it's really cheap for France. I still wish I could cook somewhere! There's nothing like enjoying your own pasta in your room, watching a movie:-)
I think I'm just going to relax today, maybe meet the Norwegians in the afternoon, sleep a little and get my room organized (you can imagine it's a mess already:-)

Hasta la vista

Settling in

I have arrived at the HEC campus here in Jouy-en-Josas about 2 hours ago. Wasn't a bad trip, Slavo drove me to the Bratislava airport at 7 in the morning, so I had plenty of time to catch the plane (which was finally 20 min late). The lady at the check-in counter fortunately didn't seem to think that 4kg of baggage-overweight was a big problem. I slept through the whole flight, landed at Orly at around 10. Getting here from the airport seemed to be quite complicated. There was a huge line to buy RER tickets, but in a moment of rare lucidity I have packed a couple of Euro-bills in my wallet so could use the lonely ticket machine and skip ther line. I had to change 3 times, but it was ok.

When I finally got here, I was a bit lost, and trying to find the accomodation office with 30kg on your back isn't exactly fun. I moved in to building E, room number 21. The rooms here are equivalent to Prague's (VSE) "A dorms", but instead of three people they house just one. No kidding, for EUR385 a month!! There is no private toilet though, and the shower is in a kind of mini-room between two rooms. Each room has a semi-transparent glass door leading to it, so you can see when someone is taking a shower (and many more details I suspect:). I had to call the acccomodation office to get a special internet cable (it is quite unlike anything I've seen before, these French have to be different in everything), and then had to find a internet-service centre to get passwords to access the net.

Needles to say, I got lost and somehow ended up in the HEC directorate building. When I was beginnig to get desperate, I overcame the fear of speaking French and asked some lady where to go. She didn't know what I wanted so she led me to Britta Delhay (nice name, Britta:-), the head/chief/boss/overlord of all things CEMS here. I felt like a stupid 5 year old who lost his mommy at the swimming pool:-/ Anyway, we got things sorted out and now I'm writing this nonsensical post...

Next on my to-do list: Find a place to eat! My walnut-cake my mom made was sooo good it just ran out right now, and I don;t want to eat Horalky and cheese the rest of the weekend:-)

P.S. Oh yeah, speaking of speaking French, I have been speaking it the whole day now and seem to be getting by just fine, although I'm clearly missing a lot of vocabulary, and sometimes slip into a different language (for some unknown reason, I said danke instead of merci to a ticket controller...I'm weird)

my flickr

Ehm, I forgot to say that I'll be uploading pictures to my flickr account from now on, until I finally buy some server space to serve my storage needs.