leaving Mexico City

Dear Friends,

I am utterly sorry for not keeping you updated on the last two weeks here. First of all there was exam week, were I was pretty stressed and my nerves were really down. I guess I passed all the stuff that I need - at least chances are extremely high. Then there was this week, were we had this "Doing Business in Mexico" course. I thought it would be just some easy lectures and so, but it was a whole program with visitors from Darden, Michigan and University of Southern California. We had the lectures in a room without power plugs and the days (mostly including excursions) were quite long....

Anyways, my last day in Mexico has broken. Now I am really not that ready to leave - its just for all the people that became friends, and the fact that we had a beautiful warm day today and seen some very nice places does not make it any better. I am very lucky to finally see Tine again after such a time. Unfortunateley we only have some 4 days before she heads off to Singapore - gosh, that's a crazy world!

No new news on the internship front, though. Hope to get that better very soon.

My new computer is just out for delivery, but as it comes from Shanghai that might take a week or so. Better did, so that I can fully concentrate my attention to the really important things!

We've been to San Angel today, were an historic market is. It is far in the south of Mexico, originally a rich small village, mostly inhabited by Spanish folks. Afterwards we went to a big market were they sell ALL the fake stuff, and by all I mean all. Rolex watches (pretty well done), Shoes, Computer games :-), T-Shirts, DVDs, Video Games.... whatever you want. I bought some nice stuff.

OK, now the bags are packed (hope they don't rip, they are just toooooo full), I am leaving in half an hour. Wow.

Mexiko has been great!
For all you folks who were waiting for more photos:
I have set up a gallery at floho.com, and when I have time and the new machine - in about 2 weeks - you will get lots and lots of photos from mexico there. So stay tuned!

For all you Mexican folks reading this:
It has been a great pleasure getting to know you all, working and partying with you. Write me at florian.hollender@whu.edu or f.hollender@alumni.ipade.mx, although I am likely to check the first one much more frequently.

This is the line, 'cause I said so!
Cheers

Florian

Deadline stress

Howdy!

Again, a weekend passed, and monday hit me with full force. Yesterday I had a very funny evening with Henning - burger, "Bodyguard" and beer. Lots of beer. Gosh, when I went to bed at 3 am I was really drunk, so there was no option to start that paper for monday right then. Well... I also slept a bit longer. When I finally started the paper at 2pm today, I still believed we could send it in via email until midnight. Damn was I wrong! Hansjörg, back from his trip, cleared the facts: Printed out and handed in until 6pm. OH-OH! There I was, four hours left, and no idea what to do. The task: "Create a Balanced Scorecard System". OK, ok... so out of the blue I invented a new economy firm, gave them a vision and a strategy, some problems and then, of course, the pot of gold, the Balanced Scorecard itself, which is mainly about setting up a system of figures which measure if you reached the targets they are connected with and also setting up measures to reach the targets. All in the focus of finance, customer, processes and learning. I did it just in time - 8 pages. Ran into IPADE, printed it, handed it in at 5:57pm. Afterwards I had time for some proofreading, and I only found two bigger errors, which is quite good I suppose for ZERO proofreading beforehand. Remains only one problem: Now Hansjörg told me I had to write the paper in Spanish. Hm. Bad luck. So I will have to kneel down in front of the professor tomorrow and ask for forgiveness or so. We'll see.

Good news: On floho.com I finally managed to integrate the gallery! There are already two little albums online, one with IPADE pictures (including the pizza-ordering in class) and one from the RODEO-Club. Check them out!

Good news: WHUknows domain is registered. Still not sure if that system makes sense - Felix for example doesn't believe it - but eager to try it out.

Good news: Life is good!

so far.
CU!

WHU knows!

Here I go again!

Saturday was quite uneventful... but it was so much fun!
I slept some good hours, after the friday hassle of getting that paper done and stuff, I desperately needed that. Ruben had invited us for a BBQ in the afternoon, so that was the first station after sloooooowly getting out of bed, shower, shave, ready 2 go. On Friday, Henning had hit me quite hard with the squash ball, right underneath the right eye. Nothing severe happened, It didn't even swell a lot. But two centimeters up, and the result would have been very different. So after the BBQ we went to WalMart to get some safety googles and some beer for the evening. We ended up having bought so much stuff (ice cream with three different sauces, hamburgers, sweets, something more to drink, all these useless but tasty/funny things) that we had to take a cab back to the residence :-)
Then we went for another, this time safer, game of squash. Gee, my wrist hurt a lot... that 9 sets had been a bit too much the day before. Nevertheless, it was fun. At night we saw "Species", old movie, but nice. Henning and I nearly fell asleep in the living room, so we decided to call it a day and go to bed early, at about 11pm.

What happened? I woke up at 5am... tried to call Tine, but the Skype-Server had some problems, so I wrote her a mail, surfed the net a bit... oh, there was that funny video that I wanted to show to Henning, were is it? Oh, some new topics on macuser.de... oh, great, the software from Wikipedia is open source, what could we do with that?

Finally, I stayed up until now (10am), installed the Wikipedia Software to get a students' knowledge base up and running. Right now I am designing the logo and think about registering a domain for it right away... but maybe I should check if the students really want that to happen (after all, it requires their work to write articles, but in my opinion this would really be a big step forward for all of us. When everybode writes articles about the field he is really good in, we could cover ground pretty fast - and everybody wins! I guess I will call it "WHUknows!", let's see how the resonance will be.

Will catch some sleep now, bye!

Que gente amable!

That means something like: "What lovely people!"

Got to share with you what happened right now at university, it is unbelievable!

I got my ass out of bed a little tiny bit late (at about 4pm), but as I had no course today that was fine with me. Of course, I woke myself up with half an hour of "Lost in Translation" :-) Maybe I should go buy another DVD just to get off that drug.
However - I went to IPADE to check if I got the letter from my bank. I ran across the guy who sent the package for Christine for me yesterday, and he was friendly as ever. When I told him that the package did not make it in time (DAMN!) and therefore I would get my money back, he was fine with that too and told me he would take care of the matter (as I gave him the money and the transaction was made over the IPADE-acount). He also had a tip where to go to see if my bank letter had arrived. Cool guy. Then I went to the offices to get a copy of a case which I have to write a paper about until tomorrow (bah!), and which I unfortunateley never received. So the people in the copy shop (we have our own!) told me were the office of the professor is. There I explained my case and the secretary went and made a copy of the 28 pages for me, and also printed out the question sheet. All with a smile and with a "never mind" on her lips. Wow! I went back to the main building to search for the girl who manages the post for the MBA course. It was nearly 6pm, but she was still there. Of course, she had time as well, and ran into me with exactly the letter I had been waiting for. Totally happy I got me a coffee and took a rest outside, as the guy from the post office ran into me again. In the meantime he had called UPS to check back why my package had not arrived in time! WOW! I did not ask him to, but I guess he was curious what had went wrong. I took the chance and asked him if there was a possibility to mail back the documents for my bank with something like a "half-express"-UPS, which is not as costly but still faster than the regular mail (The documents took 10 days to get here!). He was not sure what would be the best possibility, so he told me he would call the different services (UPS, DHL, etc) tomorrow and figure that out for me.

After all that, I was really close to cry out in happiness. The people here are really lovely, helpful and friendly that it can't get any better!!!

From travel to philosophy?

Oh dear,

I should stop watching that movie over and over and over again :-)
It is running nearly non stop, still, and when it is not on I listen to the soundtrack. Normally I have my headet on as my laptops's speakers are broken, but it is only mono. Now I discovered that the headphones of my MP3-Player could do it, too... but unfortunateley their cord is just long enough to be barely able to sit in front of the laptop in a slightly bent position, which will certainly give me some pain in my back tomorrow. But hey: Stereo!!!

I guess I am running in a bit of trouble with the university... no, I did not flash in class, I did not show up drunk, none of the stuff that makes you a legend more than you could want to. It's just that I am already leaving in two and a half weeks (weird!), and most of the qualifications for the courses are done already. I just have no clue if I really have done everything that is necessary to pass the courses, and as you know: One course not passed, and I am in big trouble. I better get to see my mentor "Preceptor" tomorrow and straighten things out with him, if that's possible. I guess I just have to put my hopes in the friendliness of the Professors. Janina (from Witten-Herdecke) told me that is is unlikely exchange students don't pass... but that alone does certainly not comfort me.

Another problem: I sent Christine a birthday package via UPS. Yes, I could have sent it earlier, but you know me, I am terrible with such stuff. Mainly I struggled with "what to buy" and "will it fit into the envelope" just too long, and here I am, all messed up. The UPS guys assured me via phone that the package will arrive at the destination at the 3rd of March - just right. But now I am tracking it online, and what does it say: "STATUS: EXCEPTION". Which means, after looking that up at Google, that delivery is delayed. BULLSHIT! I did not pay for trouble and bad mood and "Boy, you should have sent it earlier, now I am mad at you!", but for "Thanks darling, your gift just arrived at time!". Damn stupid UPS.
UPDATE: I just called UPS in Germany (had to wait because they have no one in the call center before 7:30 German time), and they say that the package is GUERANTEED to arrive TODAY (3rd of March) before 10:30. Hell, whazzup? They say everything looks fine with the package, but is hasn't made it through customs yet (outch). I shall call back in two hours because then they might have a new scan and can tell me more. Well, seems that not everything is lost yet.

You want more problems?
I can't find the data cable for the camera, which keeps me from sharing lots and lots of unbelievable important pictures with you. Well... maybe it's a wink from above that I should care more about picture quality, not quantity? Hell, I don't know.

Even more bad news?
I still don't have a job for summer. The only opportunity that I might have is an unknown software start-up from some guys from my university, based in cologne (where I don't want to work). OK, the job description is fairly interesting, but that might also be tuned to sound good. The pay seems to be some 100 EUR a day, which is fairly impressing for me, but I am not willing right now to trade in money for being with Christine. Hell, there must be a chance to find a job in Hamburg! Right now there are 5 applications running, and I got rejected 2 times already. Argh.

Some good news?
My back still does not hurt.

Good night!

Lost in Translation

Hey friends,

obviously I am doing good, I don't even have time to post regularly. Maybe I am not that affected by what they phonily call "blogging culture" as I thought.
I guess some people who will be reading this will just feel justified in the way they think about me - good or bad or worse. Go ahead. You people are making me stronger, whatever you do.

I just saw the movie lost in translation, and therefore you will find nothing like the "what I did today and on the weekend" stuff here, although I had a great time and will tell you later obviously.

This film is just great. It catches my mood, it catches me - so much that it nearly hurts. What is it about big cities? What is it about being far from home? What is it about? Why am I missing my past, why do I long for times that have passed by so quickly? And why do I feel like I am missing my future as well?
If you haven't seen the movie, you won't understand. If you haven't been sitting on your bed in a huge city, far away from home, asking yourself some frightening honest questions, you won't understand.
This is a wonderfull moment, where I understand nothing but am closer to me than most of the time. I haven't been in this mood for some time, not since Singapore. I missed it. It is strange to welcome this mood and these feelings, to welcome being sad and thoughtfull, but it makes perfect sense. It is like a catalysator for truth and honesty. If you asked me now what I think about you, maybe I would be so honest it hurts both of us. But foremost I am honest to myself right now, and that is the best feeling of all. I am constantly lying to myself, more or less. Not in a way that would let me drift from reality, nothing like losing my sense. Just that constant, everyday stuff to make it easier to live with oneself. Do you know that?
I don't know where I am going from here - except from locations, occupations. Back into the arms of my beloved girl, who I need so much right now. In fifteen minutes I will call her to wake her up and give her a start into her new day. Some thousand miles away, living in another world right now, but always part of mine. It is good to know she understands and is the only one I can share these moods with - being on my own but embraced by her.

travellin' prayer

Is the name of a song from Billy Joel that I am hearing every day. It's not downright spiritual or religious, although "God" is mentioned quite often. It is about a man who prays to god to take good care of his girlfriend which is travelling abroad. OK, maybe it has a religious touch, but you could also say "dear forces of the universe" or "dear luck", please take care of my girlfriend, as she is far away and I want that nothing happens to her.

So, no you know.
I am STILL planning to get my PowerBook (see that "my"? Haha). These things are just driving me crazy in a positive way. I am also planning to visit Tine in Singapore before I start the internship that I don't have yet (applications are running, but I still have to write a bunch), this is gonna be real fun. Thinking of Singapore I always get a good feeling - the warmth, the people, the city, the Food Courts... Oh yeah, I will order a green curry, get a cheap starbucks coffee afterwards, take Tine to the Orchid gardens, then to the night zoo, and when the day is over we will walk along the river, have a drink or two and just enjoy being together. This will be GREAT!

I heard of snow falling in Germany and nasty temperatures - well, poor Germans. I already get mad here when the sun is not shining or temperatures drop below 20 degrees... that's suffering on a high level, isn't it?