London: logos and books

London has style, more style than New York City, sorry but it's true. Whoever does design for London Underground is a genius, I am your fan!

Another London logo that I find great is Visit London promo:


Today I discovered Stanfords', the world largest map and travel book store! Despite the Christmas frenzy around me I zoomed out and stepped into my favourite world of guidebooks, maps, notebooks and photo albums. What a stunning collection. Certainly another tick for London

Into the wild, into the real world

We graduated 5 days ago, the INSEAD December 2009 pack. I graduated 5 days ago, unbelievable.

As Rachna put it during her graduation speech, this year we studied more, travelled more, ate more, drank more, danced more, laughed more - we did everything more except slept significantly less.

I maybe did not eat more or travelled more, but certainly felt more, experienced more, thought more, challenged myself more. 2009, aka INSEAD year, turned out to be one of the most memorable, important and defining years for me, if not the most. Time will tell. I have been blessed yet again to have experienced INSEAD - to start in Singapore and to finish in Fontainebleau, from pepper crabs and endless noodles in the Singaporean tropics to the most charming apartment of my life in Château de Fleury, endless wine and cheese tastings.



And now it is time for the real life to begin, maybe slightly less hectic and dense, but certainly full of INSEAD after parties!

I hope to London home after 2 years of being homeless. Let's see what happens!

Last year's joke is still relevant today: "Balance Sheet: on the left side there is nothing right, on the right side there is nothing left."

Google

Google googles and more - isn't it cool?

from Milan Kundera, The Joke

“I had always liked to tell myself that Lucie was something abstract, a legend and a myth, but now I knew that behind the poetry of these words hid an entirely unpoetic truth: that I didn’t know her; that I didn’t know her as she really was, as she was in and to herself. I had been able to perceive (in my youthful egocentricity) only those aspects of her being that were turned directly to me (to my loneliness, my captivity, my yearning for tenderness and affection); she had never been anything to me but a function of my own situation; everything that went beyond that concrete situation, everything that she was in herself, had escaped me. But if she was really a mere function of my situation, it was logical that when that situation altered (when another situation succeeded it, when I grew older and changed), my Lucie vanished with it, because from then on she was only what had escape me in her, what had not concerned me, what was beyond me. And so it was also logical that after fifteen years I had not recognized her. She had long been to me (and I had never thought of her except as being "to me") a different person, a stranger.

The message of my defeat had been trailing me for fifteen years, and now it had caught up with me. Kostka the eccentric (whom I'd never taken more than half seriously) had meant more for her, known more about her and loved her better (not more, because the strength of my love could scarcely have been greater): to him she had confided everything - to me nothing; he had made her happy - I had made her unhappy; he had known her physically - I had not. And yet all I needed in order to possess the body I so desperately desired was one simple thing: to understand her, to know her, to love her not only for what she was to me but for everything in her that did not immediately concern me, for what she was in and to herself. I had been unable to do that and so had hurt myself and her. A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrical age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people (no matter how dear) are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth. Yes, for fifteen years I'd thought of Lucie only as the mirror that preserved my image of those days!”