Happy Chinese New Year

I successfully missed Chinese New Year festivities in Singapore by spending the long weekend in the rain forest of Kuching, Malaysia (Borneo Island). True to its name, it was raining or rather pouring most of the time. Some of us applied the sunk cost concept flew back to Singapore earlier. Others looked at the opportunity costs and stayed. It was good fun, especially the dinner in Topspot seafood food court (raw fish on the picture to the left was in fact grilled as well as prawns, red snapper, stingray, and crabs).


I completely organized myself with the due dates - synchronized on all my calendars and multiple work stations. I bought a lovely Acer Aspire One 8.9" "big calculator" as I call it for $430 to carry with me to campus to check emails and write assignments. ThinkPad is too heavy to be running around with.

I am continuing to filter my pictures from India. I will take myself out to a big dinner if I ever finish the mission (from 3,000 to the best 100).

My final achievement of today was installation of Qlock application with 4 different times zones on my desktop to keep track of my around-the-world network.

INSEAD

It has been 3 weeks since I started my MBA program at INSEAD. I have met more exciting, fun, interesting, chill people than I thought I would. Predominately due to that factor I am very happy here. Also perfect weather, pool, food courts with abundance of Asian dishes for $2 contribute somewhat.

First period consists of 5 core subjects (mostly analytical), out of which I exempted from Financial Accounting during the first week. So my workload is less. Also [so far] the course material is repetition from my undergrad, so my workload is even less. I am also not applying to any finance internships, so my "career" activities have not started, so my workload is even less. The result - I am not stressed the way I am supposed to be stressed if you listen to "the average" experience at INSEAD in P1.

But I am busy with the stuff I enjoy - talking to people, booking trips, reading, attending extra curricular activities.

Last weekend I spent on the "Singaporean beach", an Indonesian island of Bintan, a 45-minute ferry ride away. This weekend we are going to the island of Borneo, to Kuching, Malaysia. The experience hopefully will be more authentic and cheap. Tons of other ideas are floating around for the upcoming weekends and short break between our "periods".

To be continued...