First month, so far so good

Just finished one month of intensive Spanish and one week of pre-courses. Man, I surely have been out of school too long. Those accounting problem sets took me quite some time to finish. Not that I didn't know how to do them, but getting my answers on to the paper (and excel) surely took some time. My god, what will I do when real classes start in a week? For accounting I got a help line and work experience. But for others, totally on my own. In addition, Spanish is getting harder and harder. Exponentially harder. If I passed the module exam I took a few days ago, for the next level, I will need to start discussing business cases in Spanish. Man, I cannot even order food at a restaurant. In class in order to illustrate how hard I find Spanish is, this is how I explained it to my class: En chino, yo comer, tú comer, él comer, nosotros comer, vosotros comer y ellos comer. Todos comer. Y, ayer yo comer, hoy yo comer, mañana yo comer, ahora yo comer. Todos COMER. Mira, chino es muy fácil.

IESE is big on career counseling. Even before school starts, we have sessions after sessions of presentations and workshops. I even had a CV review already for my internship application. My adviser basically ripped through my CV. I always thought that I had a good CV. It was the same format I used at Wellesley and afterwards. I even helped other ppl (in Taiwan) in writing a CV. But after the meeting, I totally had to redo it. Going to get review notes back from her on my new version tomorrow. Hopefully it is better.

The scary thing is that I need to decide now what I want to do for my internship. For me, I want to first decide what I want to do after graduation and then work back to decide on my internship field and strategy. My long-term plan has changed since 9 months ago. Need to be in full gear now. I'm at business school. Need my old self back. My old Wellesley super women go-go-go self back. (I surely have changed during my 3 years of working.)

Yesterday was a Barcelona public holiday, La Merce. After successfully forcing myself to leave my apartment, I went to city center to watch the parades. (I'm not a parade person.) So many people. After squeezing inch by inch to the front, I finally got to see the famous giants. It was great. The spectators were just few feet away from the parade. You can really feel the excitement. (Unlike the Macy's New Year Parade.)

We finally figured out basically how to work the washing machine. (For the past few weeks I had been hand washing my clothes.) The problem for me is that I still need figure out the different functions. Got this knob with 17 different functions. In Spanish. In abbreviation. Yah, I know I have been studying Spanish for quite a while, but Spanish washing machine abbreviated terminology, well, isn't really my expertise.
Anyways, these two days I'm trying to get all my laundry done, all my shirts ironed and buttons sewn. Need to start wearing business formal tomorrow. Glad that I got some of my stuff my parents mailed to me. (From Paris to Barcelona takes 1.5 weeks?!!) At least I got proper shoes to wear. Other option is to wear my crocs. (Don't laugh, I love my crocs. I even saw someone wearing a green crocs on the street in Barcelona.)

Spain is an interesting country. You get invited to a dinner at a restaurant and the hostess arrives more than an hour late. You run home to let your repair man in but he doesn't show up or even bother to call. Mañana is always Mañana times I don't even know how many times. The school's calendars show 3 different start dates. Buses run red lights. Pick pocketing is common (and almost acceptable) to a point that if you catch someone trying to get into your bag, the person (pick pocketer) gets mad.

On a serious note, one of my roommates was robbed yesterday on the street by a person on a motorcycle. My roommate was even walking with her friend (a big guy) when the robber snatched her bag. So horrible. I never thought that this can happen in Barcelona.