Sunday, December 02, 2007

Finally: Update for the english community 1

Well at least I tried to comment on a lot of pics at picasaweb.google/glatt.markus in english but it would be unfair of course to not update at least a bit of my blog here in a language that more people can actually read ;)

So for all my MBA colleagues back from Germany and of course all the interested people here in Macao (Yeah Sasja I know u will read also the german version just to be informed ;) ) - sunday morning in the cockpit is the time to avoid studying again and do sth. good for the general public.

Time is passing pretty fast here and now already 4 months of my stay in the so called Las Vegas of Asia have been gone, which makes a lot of people already a bit sad - the first ones will start going back to their home countries already next week (Bert, yeah, that's you).

Arriving here was as exciting as leaving Germany for the first time for a longer period - never done that one before but that was what all the fuzz with the MBA finally was all about - going to another country, improving my english further and exploring another, totally different culture. That's why I was already from the beginngin excited about going to Asia, with possibilities in Singapore and Macao. Macao was a bit smaller and the stay was with 6 month longer than in Singapore (3 months) so it was pretty obvious that I wanna have the "full throttle".

So in August I finally started to settle in Macao. 85% humidity and average temperature of 33 degrees did not help for the white German in the beginning a lot. Whereever you went and whatever you did outside - even normal walking - you just were sweating like crazy. Finally this paid off since by now it's still not going below 15 degrees so worth the sweating in the summer time.
First living in the dorm was a "cultural experience" for itself: 2 people living in a 15 squaremeter room was not the situation I really wanted to adapt to for my time here. So I moved into a nice 90sm apartment with 2 finnish guys - Santtu and Sami. Both very humble and relaxed and funny and outgoing in the first place - so no wonder us three were think-a-like when it came to partying and/or studying. Great times with the guys here and I will certainly miss that time when we have to leave here (Guys, thats the sentimental part of this, so take it as my biggest compliment :) ).

75 exchange students in total, a population of 550,000 inhabitants in Macao with very little living space makes life really cozy and more family-like. Whenever you go out, whereever you go you can be assured that there will be at least some students you will meet - that's what we all like about Macao.

The University of Macao is a really well organized one, with a lot of friendly people - we had basically for every need or wish a certain contact person that will help us for everything. In that context - GRACE (and of course Sammy and Goretti) THANK YOU thousands of times for your passion to help the exchange students - whether with questions about housing situation, ordering Gas, finding Bed sheets or whatever other possible question, we could call her basically 24-7. The only request she had towards us - NO POLICE :)) At all parties or things you do, please, no police. And we managed to do so so far.

Parties in Macao, another big issue :) In order to avoid police we have to end the parties at 12, otherwise the neighbours are allowed to call them, so parties here start quite early which doesn't necessarily mean that it ends early ;)
Another crazy thing here is the creativity of the exchange students. First of all of course is our apartment here - we came up with crazy party ideas like the "Saturday Wifebeater feat. Daddy Bling Bling" or upcoming in a week "BadSanta and his diiiirty little helpers". People are crazy with theme parties here which is very funny coz everybody has a chinese Visa and across the boarder is a nice "little" (its actually pretty big but we only manage to cross the boarder and go for shopping in the mall directly after the boarder) city where you can find all imaginable things of course for little money. So people like to dress up, we had also the Posh&Sexy party, White Party and latest was the Disco Party where everybody was looking like early Michael Jackson in white ;)

Basically I explained things in a wrong order here - according to the quote "Work hard, party hard" I should have started with studying ;) I am the first and the only exchange student in the MBA course here which is challenging but also pretty exciting in the first place, since normally in other courses people like to cling together but for me it was the chance to get experience in working with Asians firsthand since I was the only Westerner here. There were 4 courses offered here and therefore I took all of them. Management Information Systes, Business Ethics and Relational Skills for Managers plus a Chinese Culture course. I was a bit upset in the beginning since my courses took place during the same time as the elementary Chinese, so unfortunately I was not able at all to study some basic Mandarin here (so dont ask me to speak with you please, it's not happening so far). I tried to find a private school here but I ended up with some online courses which showed me that this would have to be a considerable time amount spent on learning and understanding this language since already "hello, my name is" was quite breaking my skills of listening and speaking foreign languages.

Another enjoyable part of the stay here is the travelling of course - like all the people during our MBA tried to explore most of the parts in Europe- we r doing the same thing here. Whenever there was a public holiday so far we took some days off and accessed other cultures. So far we have been to Malaysia (Suet, I love that country even though we only have been to the eastern island with Kota Kinabalu and Saba), Thailand and Beijing and more trips to come up of course. Just a wonderful region here to travel (coz basically it's also pretty cheap which is very helping the student's bank account).

Now I am in my final weeks of exams here, as you can imagine the "drill" in writing papers, preparing presentations in short time period from Pforzheim helps me a lot so I end up of course preparing most of the presentations for the different groupworks, which isnt a big problem. After all time has passed unbelievably quick here and after the exams there is only two months left to further widen my experience here. I really enjoyed the time with the people, the different cultures and the experience here, so maybe I will be lucky enough to find a master thesis here in China, I surely would appreciate it - Culture and food are worth studying it a bit more. Not even to mention the business and economic aspects around here. Everyday you read fascinating articles and astonishing things about business related aspects here, not only from the Macao perspective but also of course from the bigger picture - Chinese Economy as a whole.

Well, 12 o'clock now and time to continue the studying part, thats it so far for the first english update, I hope and can keep u
posted soon again. Hope everybody is doing fine back in Europe, all the busy bees with their master thesis - I wish everybody good luck, strength and especially a lot of creativity throughout this process of finishing the program we all enjoyed together so far.

All the best from far away,

Markus

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