Talk about surreal. I’m riding my bike home from the train station in Dordrecht at 5:30pm on a Sunday night. As it is a Sunday, all the residents of Dordrecht are required by martial law to shut themselves in their homes and remove all traces of life from the town. Read more
The blog posts have gotten a little infrequent since I started my MBA, and I’d like to take this chance to explain why: From the 10th to the 15th of January I was basically in school or going to school from 7:00am until 6:00pm. The next week I was catching Read more
I just finished my MBA “Start Weekâ€. I’m pretty sure the model for start week is Boot Camp. Just a quick recap: a little over a year ago I decided that an MBA would not only be a useful career tool, but would actually teach me a lot of things Read more
I had my first state-sponsored Dutch lesson last night. Right after my first day of MBA school. I was pretty tired, but I managed to show up at the right place at the right time. I was directed to my classroom, met my teacher (very nice lady with an unfortunate Read more
I have had two days of MBA classes at the Erasmus Universiteit, the biggest university in Rotterdam. Among the differences between American and European educational systems: they sell cans of Heineken and little bottles of wine in the school cafeteria.
New Year’s Eve – 2004 It’s 2:30pm on the first of January, 2005, and I am just starting to feel awake. Last night Ann and I accompanied Anja and Geert to the fabulous “Sporthal Pollepel†(The Ladle), a gymnasium about three basketball courts wide and deep, where 350 of Duffel’s Read more
The book I read that said that there are, on average, 23 cloudless days in the netherlands in a YEAR was not joking. Winter is pretty grey, cold, and miserable. Yesterday it snowed for the first time, only an inch of slushy stuff that was gone by noon, but still Read more
Ann, as usual, prepared this years Christmas cards. She is always very good about keeping track of everyone’s address and sending them each a hand-written Christmas card. However, since this is a very industrial process involving a long assembly line of card writing, postage stamping, envelope licking and trying to Read more
Merry Christmas to all! Our first Christmas in the Netherlands, our second in Europe (we were in London for Christmas 2000), and only my second Christmas overall away from my family (which, when I say it out loud, makes me feel equal parts mamma’s boy and nostalgic). Neither Ann nor Read more