I have just come back from Genova. As a customer with Trenitalia today, I was very positively surprised. Instead of being stuffed into one of the usual 30-old year noisy cars, they deployed a brand new, silent train with seats and entertainment systems that looked like they were stolen from an airplane. Nice! I spend the time to catch up with almost three weeks of unanswered emails. Needless to say that I only got half way through it.
It was great to spend two days with my girlfriend and my parents. We took it easy and did not anything at all. I really enjoyed it and hated having to leave again. I am so tired of constantly being on the move, never to sleep in the same bed for more than a couple of days at the time. While I know I will miss IMD when I am no longer here, then I also look forward to getting back to a somewhat normal life, a life where they days have some kind of rhythm and routine. Not too much, of course, but enough to feel that you actually have a home.
The first signs of things coming to an end are becoming obvious too obvious to be ignored. This weekend I moved my motorbike to Genova with the intention of not bringing it back, committees for the yearbook and graduation have been established and on Tuesday we have a 'move-out' session with the MBA Office on how we exit the country again. Exit?!? How can that be? We have barely started yet!
For the next day and half we will be back in class again for the first time since the building blocks ended. I really look forward to that, it is like the family coming together again, even if it is just for a little while. There are too many people that I haven't seen for the past two months!
Showing posts with label genoa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genoa. Show all posts
Monday, September 28, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Tour de Southern Europe
It is 23.00 here in Genoa, but I feel like it is much later.... or earlier in the morning. Perhaps I still have a bit of Singapore time left in me. Out there it is 5.00AM now.
Yesterday morning my parents picked me up in Frankfurt airport. They left Denmark on Monday and had via Bremen taken the trip through part of the Rhine valley. From Frankfurt we drove west towards Strassbourg, where we caught the so-called Alsace Whine Route. The route goes through 170km of vineyards at the foot of the Vosgian mountains, small picturesque villages with colorful houses and flowers everywhere. It looks like it is straight out of a fairytale. We had apparently hit the peak of the harvesting season, so everywhere we met these tall funny looking grape-picking-machines and tractors with trailers full of grapes. We went into a small place to buy some wine, but they were so busy harvesting that they barely had time to serve us. We got our wine, though, and we also found small places where we could get bread, cheese and sausage, so finally dinner was secured. French dinner that is. Awesome!
Alsace has throughout history been thrown back and forth between Germany and France, but since 1919 it has been in French hands. The German influence is still significant and everywhere you see names that are a mix of German and French. Just take the small town of Dambach La Ville as an example, or Haut-Koeningensburg – and old castle on mountaintop where we stopped by. In the late afternoon we found the highway back to Lausanne, had our awesome French purchases for dinner and went straight to bed.
This morning I had the pleasure to show my parents around the school. They saw the dungeons, the powernap room, the auditorium, the canteen and all the other places that have been the center of our lives for the past nine months. Most of all they met the people I have been working so closely with. I have been gone for three weeks, which is an eternity at IMD. Trying to catch up with everyone on what had happened during those three weeks proved impossible. I will have to spend all of next week doing that.
In the afternoon I got on my motorbike and headed off towards Genoa with my parents in the car behind me. My girlfriend now lives in Genoa in Northern Italy and I will be moving here when done in Lausanne in December. This was a good time to bring the motorbike here for good. I am out for a big part of October and if we get into November it gets too cold and too risky to move it. The six hour drive was quite an experience. Particularly the winding road on the way up to the St Bernard mountain pass reminded me of the motorbike trip in France only a month ago. We started with sun and 22C in Lausanne, were hit by 12C and rain on the Italian side of the St Bernard tunnel and ended up with 26C upon arrival here in Genoa.
Now I have a day and a half to catch up on things with my girlfriend, my parents, my email, my homework for next week and all the other things I have neglected for the past three weeks. There is no such thing as a full-off weekend just yet.
Yesterday morning my parents picked me up in Frankfurt airport. They left Denmark on Monday and had via Bremen taken the trip through part of the Rhine valley. From Frankfurt we drove west towards Strassbourg, where we caught the so-called Alsace Whine Route. The route goes through 170km of vineyards at the foot of the Vosgian mountains, small picturesque villages with colorful houses and flowers everywhere. It looks like it is straight out of a fairytale. We had apparently hit the peak of the harvesting season, so everywhere we met these tall funny looking grape-picking-machines and tractors with trailers full of grapes. We went into a small place to buy some wine, but they were so busy harvesting that they barely had time to serve us. We got our wine, though, and we also found small places where we could get bread, cheese and sausage, so finally dinner was secured. French dinner that is. Awesome!
Alsace has throughout history been thrown back and forth between Germany and France, but since 1919 it has been in French hands. The German influence is still significant and everywhere you see names that are a mix of German and French. Just take the small town of Dambach La Ville as an example, or Haut-Koeningensburg – and old castle on mountaintop where we stopped by. In the late afternoon we found the highway back to Lausanne, had our awesome French purchases for dinner and went straight to bed.
This morning I had the pleasure to show my parents around the school. They saw the dungeons, the powernap room, the auditorium, the canteen and all the other places that have been the center of our lives for the past nine months. Most of all they met the people I have been working so closely with. I have been gone for three weeks, which is an eternity at IMD. Trying to catch up with everyone on what had happened during those three weeks proved impossible. I will have to spend all of next week doing that.
In the afternoon I got on my motorbike and headed off towards Genoa with my parents in the car behind me. My girlfriend now lives in Genoa in Northern Italy and I will be moving here when done in Lausanne in December. This was a good time to bring the motorbike here for good. I am out for a big part of October and if we get into November it gets too cold and too risky to move it. The six hour drive was quite an experience. Particularly the winding road on the way up to the St Bernard mountain pass reminded me of the motorbike trip in France only a month ago. We started with sun and 22C in Lausanne, were hit by 12C and rain on the Italian side of the St Bernard tunnel and ended up with 26C upon arrival here in Genoa.
Now I have a day and a half to catch up on things with my girlfriend, my parents, my email, my homework for next week and all the other things I have neglected for the past three weeks. There is no such thing as a full-off weekend just yet.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Laptop dating
Have you ever heard about the concept of laptop dating? I didn't think so. If you type 'Define: laptop dating' into the Google search window you will get the answer 'No definitions were found for laptop dating'. Wikipedia cannot help you either.
The concept of laptop dating was discovered and named by my girlfriend and I. Over the last two years we have developed and refined it to an art form. It is very simple, you have probably tried it already. You take two very people that have a lot of work to do, but who still would like to spend time together. You sit them down on the sofa, feet on the ground (or on the table) and then you just let them work. From time to time they can hold hands or ask short questions, they take turns at getting up for drinks and whoever gets hungry first gets up and cooks. Simple and efficient, pathetic and beautiful. Pathetic because your body has been reduced to something that only is there to carry your head and your hands around and beautiful because it is a means to survive. Togetherness for modern day students.
I've spent the weekend in Genoa, Italy, where my girlfriend now lives. It was her birthday, so we went out to celebrate with a dinner, but other than that we just laptop dated. She is both working and studying, so with two students in the couple this has become our way of coping. Albeit it has its charm and despite that we still can laugh at it, then we can't wait for it to be over.
Her parents were there as well, so I was welcomed with Spanish tortilla and croquettas, my favorite Spanish food. I even got some to bring home, but I have eaten them already. They were just too good!
The train ride between Lausanne and Genoa is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. It zig-zags its way between lakes and mountains, through tunnels and over bridges for four hours straight. The Italian part of the trip is even more beautiful than the Swiss part, which I didn't think was possible. You should give it a try if you are in the neighborhood one day.
The concept of laptop dating was discovered and named by my girlfriend and I. Over the last two years we have developed and refined it to an art form. It is very simple, you have probably tried it already. You take two very people that have a lot of work to do, but who still would like to spend time together. You sit them down on the sofa, feet on the ground (or on the table) and then you just let them work. From time to time they can hold hands or ask short questions, they take turns at getting up for drinks and whoever gets hungry first gets up and cooks. Simple and efficient, pathetic and beautiful. Pathetic because your body has been reduced to something that only is there to carry your head and your hands around and beautiful because it is a means to survive. Togetherness for modern day students.
I've spent the weekend in Genoa, Italy, where my girlfriend now lives. It was her birthday, so we went out to celebrate with a dinner, but other than that we just laptop dated. She is both working and studying, so with two students in the couple this has become our way of coping. Albeit it has its charm and despite that we still can laugh at it, then we can't wait for it to be over.
Her parents were there as well, so I was welcomed with Spanish tortilla and croquettas, my favorite Spanish food. I even got some to bring home, but I have eaten them already. They were just too good!
The train ride between Lausanne and Genoa is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. It zig-zags its way between lakes and mountains, through tunnels and over bridges for four hours straight. The Italian part of the trip is even more beautiful than the Swiss part, which I didn't think was possible. You should give it a try if you are in the neighborhood one day.
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