Sorry for the long silence

I'm back. Wow, what a fortnight so far. After spending some fabulous time with Nithika, Joe and Dul (They now have a new addition to their family.. a baby girl) in Zurich, Terry and I made it to Fonty finally. Fonty is the short form for Fontainebleau where my School is located. The first thing that struck both of us was the fact that the roads seemed so small..Wow.. After millions of signatures in different forms in my Bank, we decided to head to Bourron Marlotte where my home is. Wow, were we in for a surprise.. This town was even smaller. Wow... I was going to have fun!!

We met with our landlady, Alix and actually ended up finding our home really charming. A small little kitchen with a mini frid

ge, two hot plates and of course a microwave first. Then there is a quite large bedroom with desks and beds and two pairs of French Windows opening into the garden was a pleasant surprise. There seemed to be adequate closet space and the bathroom was quite large. I was quite excited to unpack since by then I had been living off of a suitcase for almost 4 weeks. We decided to drive around to look for a place to eat and we just could not find grocery store of restaurant open. We ended up eating at McDonald's in France, the hotbed of culinary delights.. Speak of irony.

Saturday, we went to Paris to meet Shali and Pravin. Shali is Terry's first cousin. They are really a cute and caring couple and we shopped all day for a phone for me, flip flops, and other grocery stuff. We had some good Indian food for lunch and dinner at their place. Sunday, we actually went back and visited the Eiffel Tower. What a beautiful monument. It is much larger than the one in Las Vegas, as if that was a surprise. Paris has a very impressive transportation system and LA really needs to emulate this.

Monday was the first day of school. With nervous anticipation in my mind, we went to school. After that was just a blur.. lectures, orientations, lunches, meeting people, reading for 3 days and we had our first set of lectures. "Introduction to General Management" is just meant to introduce us to the gene

ral concepts in Management in addition to familiarizing us with the INSEAD teaching style. It was a very interactive class with many different breakout sessions with Buzz groups (Just get a couple of guys and gals next to you) to have a discussion or group sessions (My group for the next 16 weeks consist of a Greek guy who worked for Accenture, a private banker girl from Hong Kong who holds a British passport, a Singaporean guy working for the government, a real estate investor from Poland who worked in London (a woman) and me. These groups are pre-selected by INSEAD to maximize the diversity and opportunities for conflict so that we can learn to work with diverse individuals). Saturday was probably the best day of my INSEAD life so far. We had this activity called outward bound. We got to campus at 8:30 and were quickly briefed about the activity.

10 of us along with our outward bound co-ordinator piled into a bus and went into the forest. We then hiked up into the forest and have various team building exercises. One particular game required the 5 in our group to cross the 5 in the other group while navigating through a very narrow crack in a rock coming from opposite directions. The gap was just enough to take one person sideways. Just to make it interesting, all of us were blind folded. We truly learnt the meaning of helping the team at that exercise. The next activity that was called cross the line taught me a very valuable lesson. I do not care to actually air that lesson in the public domain but actually gave me an insight into how I sometimes think. I was just happy that I learnt this lesson in an outward bound activity and not in real life. We had two more activities after this and then we headed back to campus.

Monday was the first day of actual classes. I have not managed to go home before 9:30 at the earliest on each of these days. Companies are already here trying to sell themselves to our seniors. We actually try to sit in on these company presentations. I have a lot to reflect upon in the coming weeks and months and I have my work cut out. Lectures are fun but are a lot of work. We are given tons of reading to do before class and professors actually cold call us to ensure that we are prepared. Of course, we have lots of homework too. I really should be doing those homeworks rather than blogging but hey, what the heck!!

Had a flavor of LA life with an all night poker session at Shali's house last night. Of course, this was preceded by a Kill Billisque movie in Inglorious Basterds... If you liked Kill Bill, do watch this movie. But if you do not like to see human flesh and blood, I would recommend not watching it..

It is Sunday night again and time for pre-reading and homeworks. I am meeting my group at 7 to go over our plan for this week. So far, it has been fun and I do not see any reason why it should not continue.

I leave you with this dialogue from Inglorious Basterds..."I hate facts. They can be so misleading!!" Au revoir