What's going on y'all. As the title of this post says, your boy is getting mighty old. Today is my 28th birthday and, after having fiished my first week of Fall quarter classes, I feel like it is my 280th bday. This week's classes had a ton of reading, work, and readjustment to the GSB environment, but it really didn't seem that bad because I actually like these classes this quarter. one of the great things about being a second yedar student is that you get to take electives that you WANT to take instead of core classes that you HAVE to take. I've already learned more in my first week of Corporate Finance than I did in my entire quarter of Accounting last Fall and the professor (George Parker) is the funniest professor I've ever had. In fact, all of my profs are "slam dunks" this quarter...I love being a student here and having access to such on-point instructors.
Now on to the birthday celebrations...this should be a heck of a night. It's going to start with dinner with my "crew" of classmates who've basically become like West Coast family to me. At first, I tried to get my peoples not to do anything or me because I don't like people going out of their way for me, but they insisted, so they've put together a full night of stuff to help me celebrate.
After dinner, we've got a bunch of other classmates coming by our house for drinks and random kickin' it to help me celebrate. When my roomie Detavio asked me to come up with a list of people to invite, I made a big list because I figured that there would be a low yield of RSVPs...from what I've heard, I was totally wrong about that. We may have something like 40-50 people come through and it's got me wondering if the neighbors will call the cops. I guess the people here are checkin' for The Kid more than I anticipated.
Following the hanging out here, we're going to head over to the first GSB party of the year, which is being held at a mansion inhabited by 10 of my classmates. The house is nicknamed "The Compound" and the parties there are always off the chain. One of the people living in the house is my man Cameron (the guy who I lost the presidential race with last year) and he made me promise that we'd roll through. I guess that'll give me a chance to see all of the classmates who won't be able to make it through the joint we're having here. I'm planning on taking it easy tonight, but, if the music there is good, it might just become one of those nights. Also, if we've all got enough energy after a little while at The Compound, we're going to try to hit up a club in San Jose that is one of the "realest" spots I've found in this area. It will take over 30 minutes to get out there, so we may have to cancel that part of the night.
Something tells me that I'm going to need most of tomorrow to recover from the exhaustion that'll come tonight. It's all good though because one only turns 28 once, right? ;-)
I know it's been a while since I've written an entry, so I've got a lot to update y'all on. It's been so busy lately that I just haven't had time to write.
I probably should have made an entry right after I got back to the US to let folks know that I made it safely, but I have been constantly running since getting back. Between unpacking, finishing the set up of my room/house, and doing classwork, I've been swamped. It took 21 hours of traveling to get from Bangkok to SFO, but I was actually able to be productive on the flights and got all of my prep work done for my September Session seminars. I learned a ton in each of the seminars I had, but someone must have forgotten to send my professors the memo about how these joints are supposed to be easy because they assigned a load of work. Don't get me wrong...it was a really easy way to get 4 units, but I was so tired after it was all done on Friday that I literally slept 11.5 hours that night to recover from it all. I probably should have only taken on seminar so I could have eased my way back into school, but there is so much to learn that I didn't want to waste any opportunity to get more knowledge into my head.
On Tuesday morning in the middle of one of my seminars, I finally got the call from Accenture that I'd been waiting on and that call had good news...I got my job offer. I'm glad they called when they did because I was starting to worry that they weren't checkin' for me and that I'd done bootleg work for them this summer. Apparently, they had to wait for all of the interns to finish and for decisions to be made for each of us before giving anyone news about their status. I understand the reasons for this, but, in my opinion, that's a pretty bad model for how to handle offer decisions. As interns, we all work our butts off to get the good word from our summer employers and there is a lot of pressure to knock these internships out the park. The last thing an intern wants to do is be left in limbo for a month waiting to find out where he/she stands. I'm a huge fan of the model used by other companies, like Lehman and Booz Allen, where they give you the good/bad word on your last day of work. At least with that, you'dknow whether youn should be strategizing for the job search all over again when the school year starts.
In just about 23 hours, the second academic year of my MBA experience will start when my Fall quarter classes kick off. It's been over a month since I finished my summer job, but it seems so strange to be about to go back into the classroom for real, for real. All of the ceremonial things related to the school year have started...rushing to the bookstore and GSB to buy textbooks and course readers, stressing about getting readings done, wondering about how we're going to get all of this work done. I thought I'd been pretty good about getting a lot of this stuff taken care of and I still feel like I'm waaaaaaaay behind the curve. It's definitely a good feeling to be about to jump back into school head first...I don't knowwhat I'm going to do when it's time for me to go back into the Real World at this time next year. *shaking my head*
I'm in the lobby of my hotel in Bangkok readying myself to head back to SFO and I remembered a story that I didn't write an entry about...how I was daggone close to getting myself arrested in Hanoi. Here it goes...
A couple of nights ago, I was in Hanoi with Travis and Jon and we decided to meet up with a friend of Jon's and some of her peoples. We started off with dinner at a nice restaurant and decided to hit a local bar for some drinks. Everyone in the gruop was anxious to jump on some of the super low priced beer at the bar, but I don't mess with beer at all, so I ordered a screwdriver, which is ridiculously easy to make (just vodka and orange juice). When my first screwdriver came, I immediately noticed that something was wrong with it...as I was drinking, I smelled the faint scent of pine-trees in the drink. Now, I know my liquors and could tell that they'd put gin in my drink instead of orange juice. I was halfway done with that drink when i noticed it, so I decided not to make a fuss about it. When i ordered my next drink, I noticed the same thing, gin instead of vodka and this got me annoyed. I tried explaining it to the waitress, but her command of English wasn't strong enough to understand me, so I went down to the bar myself to handle it...this is where things get dicey.
When I hit the bar, I went to the closest bartender and told her that they had gotten my drink wrong. She called over the girl who made my drink and this chick just started screaming over and over about how she had put vodka in it and even brought over the bottle of Stoli's to prove it to me. I didn't let down on my argument, so she took the drink out of my hands and sniffed it and took a sip.Then, she passed it around the the other 3 bartenders with her and they did the same thing. Once the last one put it down, a random woman who was sitting at the bar sniffed my drink, sipped it, and then took a swig out of the bottle of Stoli to compare. Then, this random woman took a bottle of Gin that had been brought over and took a swig of that too in order to compare...the result of her comparison was that she agreed with me that they'd put gin in my drink. I argued a little more and they agreed to make me another drink, except with vodka instead of gin. I watched them make it and everything looked good, so I thought I was home free.
As the bartender brought my drink over, one of the other bartenders shocked the hell out of me by grabbing it from her, sniffing it, and sipping it. I couldn't even get out a "WTF?!?!?!?!" before the random woman at the bar took my drink from her and did the same thing. After she was done, she handed the drink back to me and the bartender told me to go back upstairs. I don't know abuot y'all, but there is no way that I was going to drink something that two random Vietnamese women had snotted and slobbered over, so I refused to take it and demanded another drink. This is when the knock-down, drag-out battle of words began. They told me that the drink was OK even though they'd drank out of it and I told them that I wasn't going to pay for it because it wasn't clean. Teh random woman tried to calm be down by clicking her glass with mine as if in a toast, but all that did was make me want to pour my joint on her head. I soon realized that the bartenders were not understanding a word that I was saying, so I had to hit them with my "broken English" game..."I not take drink. You drink it. It not clean and I not pay". I felt bad breaking it down like that, but that seemed to be the only way they could follow what i was saying. After about 5 minutes, I saw the bouncer (who was actually smaller than me) stand up and I thought I was about to have to throw down with him. The situation was finally settled when one of the other bartenders took the drink back and made me a brand new one, which was made correctly. Once I got that joint, I went back upstairs but decided that I wasn't going to order anything else for the rest of the night because they would have spit in it or tried to slip me something to get me sick.
Thank goodness I was calm enough not to snap on those chicks because they had me pissed to the limits of "pissivity". One thing that I definitely won't miss about being out here is the language barrier. Some folks out here speakgreat English, but others are abrely functional with it. Next time I come out to Asia, I'm going to have to put in work to make my "broken English" game as sharp as possible.
One more thing for today, I want to put a plug in for one of my classmates, Seth S., who has just launched a start-up with some friends of his called Meebo.com. In a nutshell, their site hosts a custom-developed application that allowed you to access AIM, Yahoo mesenger, MSN Messenger, and ICQ through a single web-based interface. I won't go into the details of how they make it work in the back-end, but I can attest that they've got a great system. I've been using it extensively while I've been out here in Asia and it has allowed me to chat with my peoples back home from terminals that often don't have any chat programs installed. The site launched a few days ago and they've already been getting a lot of traffic, which the system has continued to perform well under. If you get a chance, feel free to check the site out and give the development team feedback through the "Forum" link on the site. Oh yeah, I guess I should also mention that it is 100% FREE to use. I'm going to make a prediction and say that this app is going to be the big rage among internet stuff within a couple of months...when it happens, I'm going to open up a "Miss Cleo" hotline and start making predictions for cash :-)
I am officially a fan of Vietnam after the past day or so. I'm just getting back to Hanoi after taking a 2-day/1-night cruise in Halong Bay. That place is absolutely gorgeous. It was literally something out of a movie. Just nothing but clear blue skies, calm waters and green islands with caves underneath...literally thousands of those islands. I don't know if I'll ever have a chance to go there again, but I sure do hope to do so in the future. My man Jon took a bunch of pictures and I hope to post some of them up here once get gets them downloaded to his computer back at Stanford.
I wasn't always diggin' Vietnam as much as I am right now though. When we first arrived a few nights ago, I couldn't get over how dirty Hanoi was. For what I considered to be a major city, this place looked like something out of "Mad Max beyond Thunderdome". My reaction got even worse when I saw our hotel room. My man Travis had gotten us the room for only $25 per night, so I couldn't be too disappointed, but the room looked like something out of a circa-1950's house with older furniture, a blue leather sectional, a TV with no channels that worked, and a puke-green mini-fridge with drinking water in it. All of this was a disappointment, but it got laughable when i saw the bathroom, which had a toilet, a urinal, a small sink, and a shower head sticking right out of the wall with no shower stall..It was the strangest thing I'd seen in a minute. Then, it got wilder when I looked up in the bathroom and saw a roach that had to have been 5-6 inches long on the wall...no lie, that joint looked like something out of some computer animator's terminal. It was so amazing that it took me a few minutes to shake off my shock and kill the thing. That first night in Hanoi was not the big move at all.
Once I got past all of that, Hanoi wasn't too bad. The streets are dirty and buildings look run down, but all of the tourist sites were really nice to check out. The ighlight of the day was going to Ho Chi Minh's monastery and checking out his body. he's been dead for over 35 years, but the Vietnamese have had him preserved for display for all that time and, as I walked into the building, all I could think of were the songs "You'z a HO!" and "There's some hoes in this house". Even better, they refer to Ho Chi Minh as "Uncle Ho"...I don't know why, but that is so funny to me :-) Seriously though, seeing the way folks live out here has given me a whole new perspective on the little things that we often take for granted in the US and the devotion that the Veitnamese people have for their country makes me have the utmost respect for them and their patriotism.
**The stuff in the previous two paragraphs was in the last entry that got lost while I was posting it, so I hope it makes it through safely this time around.**
One more thing before I go that might amuse some of you...I'm sitting here at an internet cafe with a bunch of computers and I an seated beside a bunch of vietnamese kids playing video games. Also, I just happen to be wearing a cut off shirt because it was hot as a mugg on the boat when we left it. Anyways, when I sat down, one of the kids came over to me and asked my name. Once I told him, he started saying a bunch of stuff in Vietnamese and all the other kids started laughing, so I got a little pissed and said "What?!?!?!" in a stern tone. I think this kids saw that I was getting mad, so he said something else and then made a gesture to flex his biceps. Next, he grabbed my left biceps (which he barely was able to get his little hands around) and said something that sounded like "big"...me and my man Jon almost fell out because the Vietnamese kids were respecting The Kid's "swole"...now that's why I am all about hitting those weights and gettin' my swole on :-)
Aight y'all, time for me to get off of here and hit the airport...next stop: Bangkok.
***UPDATE***oh my damn, now this kid has me on his webcam showing me off to some girl he's chatting with for some odd reason...the swole must be so crucial to these folks out here. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I just spent the last 30 minutes writing a really long entry and this daggone public computer lost it when I tried to submit it, so I've got to write a shorter replacement.
We arrived in Hanoi last night and are in the middle of sightseeing now. We've seen a bunch of nice buildings and gardens so far and even visited the resting place of Ho Chi Minh, which lies in a glass encasement and has tours run to see him every day. The one thing that is unsettling to me so far is the level of poverty here. I thought that some people in the US had it bad, but most of America is big ballin' compared to folks here. Beggars and sick people are all over the place here and we know that we can't give them any money ebcause we'll get swarmed by other beggars if we do. I'm defintely going to leave here this weekend with a new outlook on life because I'm seeing that I've been taking a whole lot of things for granted over the years.
What's up, y'all. I'm writing this entry from an internet cafe in Chiang Mai, which is in the northern part of Thailand. We got here yesterday and got the hookup to be staying in yet another really nice hotel...Travis is doing it up so big on the lodging coordination front for this vacation. We haven't done much around here except walk around the downtown area to check out some of the old temples and the local markets, but this is a really cool place to kick it. prior to this leg of the trip, e'd been ripping and running to see as many sights as possible, but had to slow down a couple of days ago when my man Jon caught some sort of stomach bug. At first I was bummed about not being able to see more things, but, when I realized how tired I was, I started seeing the downtime as a much needed rest period out here to prepare for the Vietnam leg of the trip in a couple of days.
A couple of days ago, Jon and I went on one of the island tours in Ko Samui and had a great time. I wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the 7:30am pickup time from our hotel but he assured me that it would be worth being groggy that early in the morning. The tour started out with an hour long boat ride out to one of the islands around Ko Samui, where the achored up and let everyone on the tour go snorkeling. Now, some of you might remember my snorkeling experience from St martin last year, so y'all can understand the fears I had in getting in that water. The people on the boat convinced me to put on a life vest and try it again, which I did...but as soon as I got in the water, I felt myself going straight down and freaked out. I had to have been in the water for all of about 15 seconds. It's all good though because that was better than saying I had completely punked out. Following the snorkeling, the boat took us to another island where we hiked up toward a couple of observation decks that had the most beautiful views I've ever seen before...and I'm not exagerrating about that. What i saw was something out of a post card: blue skies, crystal clear seas, green trees, white beaches...simply amazing. Jon took some picutres of it all and I hope to get some copies of them to post on here once we all get back to the US. We had a buffet lunch on yet another island after this and the food was good, but the best part of the trip was yet to come. After lunch, the guides took us down to the beach where they had a bunch of kayaks for us. We spent about 30-45 minutes sea kayaking around that island and it was a great experience. Aside from the fact that all that rowing was helping me get my swole on, we were able to get even more amazing views of the islands and the seas from the kayaks. Following the kayaking, we just hung out on the island for a while, where we chatted with the other tour customers who were from all over the world and had other interesting stories about their times in Thailand. By the time we got back to the hotel, I was 100% exhausted, but, as Jon had promised at the start of the day, it was well worth it.
In addition to the last few days' worth of activities, I've finally been cranking on the readings for the "Information in markets and Markets of information" seminar I've got coming up and this stuff is pretty interesting. The readings are all about auction theory and the types of information involved...I never knew how easy it is to screw up something as seemingly simple as an auction. I'm hoping to knock the last of the readings out for this joint by tomorrow, so I can use the rest of my time to read the ~300 page book that we've been assigned for the other seminar I'm taking. I am SO not ready to be back in the classroom yet...
OK, by now, many of you may have heard Ludacris' song "Pimpin' all over the world". Toward the end of the CD version, a movie character named Money Mike has a part where he describes non-pimpin' characteristics...after a night on the town in Ko Samui, I think I've seen some things that could be added to Money Mike's monologue:
- If you are at a club and are kissing and hugging up on a "pro" like she's your wifey, you are not pimpin'...we shot some games of pool beside a group of guys who had some Thai "pros" with them and these dudes were acting like these girls were their GFs and what not. I thought of openly clowning them, but that would have been foul of me :-) I can't front though, the girls were kinda-sorta cute, but those dudes' game had to have been as weak as that fake no-name Kool-Aid from the dollar store.
- If you are walking down the street and get freaked out when a whole team of those "pros" pounces on you, you are not pimpin'...yeah that was me. When my friends and I got to this club, we walked down the street to get some food and had to pass a bunch of bars that each had 5-10 "pros" hanging out. As we walked by, they would come out in the street and try to get us to go into the bar. We were fine with saying 'no' to most of them, but one bar in particular had some "pros" that were on some other ish and started grabbing us. My man Travis and my man Jon were able to break through them, but I couldn't get them off me...they were like leeches. I had one grabbing each arm, one on my left leg, one tugging on my right hand, and one grabbing around my waist as if she was giving me the Heimlick Manuever. Once I was able to break away from them, I was freaked out and had to shake myself out of it. I switched it up on them as we walked back up the street though...when those chicks tried to grab me, I got all swole up on them and gave them "The Heisman" to push them off.
- If you are a member of an Asian cover band that has the audacity to do hip-hop songs but you can't pronounce the lyrics well enough not to get laughed at, you are not pimpin'...The band playing at the club was HORRIBLE! They started out by covering top-40 pop songs like "This love" and weren't that bad, but it all took a turn for the worse when they did "Lose yourself" and their rendition of the lyrics were unintelligible. We were literally dying laughing at them. then, it got worse when they did "Bring 'em out" and were about half a beat behind while spittin' the lyrics. The last straw was when they did "Crazy in love" and got to Jay-Z's part...I didn't know whether to laugh or be offended. Thank goodness they finished their set right after that because I was so close to jumping on stage and beating every member of that band like they'd stolen something.
After being up around the wackness of Ko Samui's nightlife scene, I needed a day to take it easy, so I tried to get some reading done for my upcoming September Session classes...it's going to take me a LOT of work to get back into the swing of things for school. It literally took me over 2 hours to read 10 pages of an Economics paper on Auction Theory because the material was pretty dry and my mind kept wandering. Even worse, I still have 15 pages left in that paper and another 100 pages of stuff to read for this particular seminar. I know that I said I was ready for school about a month ago, but I might have been wrong about that.
Finally, I want to give a shout out to my sister and her husband for successfully bringing my first neice Kendal Sanai X (I can't put her government name out there like that) into the world. According to my mother, everything went well, so I'm a happy big brother right now.
I can't believe that this is only Day 3 of the trip because my peoples and I have done a ton out here in Thailand so far. Right now, I'm writing from an email terminal in a resort that my man Travis picked out for us in Ko Samui (a Thai island about 1.5 hrs by plane from Bangkok) and he has outdone himself yet again. I swear this dude knows how to pick places that allow us to be ballers on a budget.
I'm pretty wiped out right now from the couple of days in Bangkok, but the time there was well worth any fatigue I'm feeling right now. We spent the daylight hours on a seemingly constant quest for sightseeing opportunities and we took advantage of some ofthe hot spots during the nighttime. We had to have visited 5-6 temples/palaces in the past couple of days and I was more and more impressed with each new one. Today, we went to the Emerald Palace and I was in awe the entire time...the place was huge and was full of some of the most beautiful architecture i'd ever seen before. It's hard to believe how old these things are because they are all maintained so well. I'm seriously determined to buy that Emerald Palace one day...a place that dope NEEDS me to live in it.
One thing that surprised me about the city was that one can do so much for next to nothing there. Because of the exchange rate ($1 = 40 bhat) and low cost of stuff, we were seriously budget ballin'. It is pretty shocking to go from paying $10-15 dollars for an average cab fare (~5-15 minutes) in NYC to paying the equivalent of $3 for a 45-minute ride all the way across Bangkok...but that sure didn't take long for us to get used to though. It got so bad that we'd immediately jump out of a cab if the driver wanted to charge us a flat 100 bhat for a ride instead of using the meter, which would have cost 40-50 bhat...and then I'd end up feeling triflin' as all hell when I realized that we were trippin' on having to pay $2.50 for the ride instead of $1.00. I could seriously get used to life in Bangkok and, once I get out of school, I'm going to have to get whichever consulting company I end up at to staff me on a project or two out in Thailand.
As good as things were in Bangkok, I couldn't give it a 100% A+ grade. One thing about Bangkok that I have to hate on is that, because most of the people there are smaller, it is damn near impossible to find a sized XL shirt out there. I saw some of the most original t-shirts in the stores, but I could never find one that would actually fit me. I'm pretty disappointed about that, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to find something that suits me here in Ko Samui or in Chiang Mai in a few days.
Another thing I was beefin' with was the epidemic of "no-rhythm-itis" I saw out in the Bangkok clubs. Imagine this...you're at a club and you see some beautiful Thai women who are dressed to impress. The DJ is spinning good AND recent music and you're ready to get out on the dancefloor and throw down. Then, your :-) turns into a :-( when you realize that the beautiful women are dancing like they have been afflicted with early-onset arthritis and a grand mal seizure. Even worse, when I finally found one that could dance, she wasn't checkin' for The Kid and hit me with "I've got to stay here and dance with my friend". Now, her friend was a straight-up mudduck with no rhythm, so I understand the gesture of kindness, but I couldn't help but be disappointed.
Alright y'all...time for me to grab the fellas and hit one of the restaurants in town for dinner. By the way, if you're a praying person, please say a quick one for one of my sisters. My mom just emailed to tell me that her water broke and her husband was rushing her to the hospital...looks like this is finally going down. Next time I post on here, I might be an uncle for the first time. :-)
I've only got 5 minutes before this computer logs me off, but I wanted to drop a quick note to let y'all know that I made it safelyto my hotel in Bangkok. And, good lawd, my man Travis hooked it up for real, for real. This hotel is SO pimpalicious and it's only $130 per night split between three of us...your boy is gonna do it up real big here.
"...The women and the caviar/
They know who we are/
'Cuz we're pimpin' all over the world!!!"
What's up, y'all. I'm writing this entry from an email terminal in the Hong Kong airport, where I'm having my first layover on the way to Bangkok. I meant to write something up before leaving Palo Alto, but it was a mad dash at the end to get packed up in time to catch my ride to SFO. I swear this place has me buggin' out and realizing that I need to get my culture game up in the near future. I've never been to a place where i've seen and heard both English used so prominently and interchangably. Prior to this trip, my only international travel had been to England and St. Martin, both of which required little stretching on my part to feel comfortable in their respective cultures...the next 2 weeks are going to have me like "WHOA!" I've always wanted to help kids reach their educational goals back home and I have a feeling that this trip will drive me to expand the scope of those efforts past Virginia and the US into places waaaaaaaaaaay across the oceans in other countries too.
Before I left, I got a chance to hang out with a bunch of my classmates and the kids who are about to start their first year and it got me re-energized about being at the GSB. When i left for the summer, I had enjoyed the experience, but, for some reason, I wasn't as hype about being there as I was when i first arrived. Reconnecting in Palo Alto with some of my classmates and seeing how excited the soon-to-be MBA1's were made me get that "I'm the luckiest guy in the world" feeling back again. Now, I've just got to get back in the classroom and be ready to throw down so that elation doesn't turn into another year of "I'm so daggone tired from all this work".
In addition to sight-seeing and soaking up some good ol' Asian culture, I've got to get my mind back into school mode in preparation for two seminars that will start right after I get back to Cali. Although Fall quarter classes don't start until the last week of September, the GSB offers 11 or 12 courses during the pre-term called "September session seminars). With the exception of the 4-unit pre-term Touchy Feely class that runs for 2 weeks starting Sept 12, the seminars run for 5 days from Sept 19 to Sept 23 and count for 2-units. These joints cover a wide range of material from women in entrepreneurship to management control and compensation and offer a chance to get a big bang of information in a short amount of time. I'm taking two of them in order to stack up on GSB credits and soften the blow of GSB classes that I'll have to forgo in order to get all my Education school units in this school year. My seminars, "Understanding Cheating" and "Information in Markets", should feed right into the leadership and management track that I've been trying to develop through the classes I've picked so far. Although I'm excited about the classes, each of them assigned a bunch of reading that needs to be done by the first day, so your boy will have to set aside some time from wyldin' out to get it all done. I guess it'll be good to give myself breaks from the ridiculousness every now and then.
I've got to jump off of this terminal so I don't miss the next leg of my flight. I'd hate to be stuck here with nothing but the clothes on my back and the readings for my two September seminar classes. I'll be sure to post another entry as soon as I can get to an Internet-connected computer. Before I go, I've got a couple of quick shout outs:
- a "Wow, this is the best airline ever" shout out goes to Singapore Airlines. I'd heard from my man Travis that this was a good airline, but seeing is definitely believing. I've never had service this good on an airline before, but that's not the end of it. The female flight attendants are all DOPE!!!...seriously on some "could have been a model in a past life" stuff. And, the food is better than what I've had in some restaurants. Their tickets are hella pricey, but I wouldn't fly any other airline in the future to come out to Asia
- an "I might have to move out here one day" shout out goes to Hong Kong. As I've walked around this airport, I've noticed that I'm one of the swolest dudes around this joint. I might have to drop out of Stanford GSB and start a new career in Hong Kong as an "enforcer" for some shady business characters out here :-) hahahahahahahahaha
It looks like my time on the East Coast for this summer has come to an end. In a few minutes, I'm going to be leaving for the airport for that long flight back out to Cali and will be starting classes again in a few weeks. I can't believe that the summer is coming to a close already...it feels like I was just landing at Dulles Airport yesterday after my Spring quarter finals. I've already mentioned how much I learned during my internship, so I won't go into that again. Instead, I'll just say that it was all of the non-internship experiences that have made this a great summer so far.
As I look toward making another trip from VA to Stanford to start a school year, I can't help but think about how different I am from the kid who loaded up his car and drove cross country last August. I left here knowing nothing about the business game and now my overall business acumen has grown by leaps and bounds. More importantly, my strategic and analytical skills have gotten hecka sharp. A few days ago, my man Rashad (GSB 2006) hit me up to help him figure out a supplier cost problem for a GMIX project he's doing in China and I naturally broke it down like a consulting case interview question. Then, earlier today, one of my former coworkers who now works for a professional sports league asked me for help with developing a yield management strategy for ticket sales and I was surprised at how quickly my mind broke the problem down and came up with ideas. My business game is getting SO crucial and, if I can ever get the overall polish that my peoples say I need, I might do some damage one day. Bump Donald Trump...I might need to start making plans to bring him on as my apprentice... ;-)
Before I hit the road, I'll give out one more set of shout-outs:
- a "I'll be back soon" shout out to my mother. I know she'd rather have me stay around for linger since I spent most of the summer up north, but she knows that I'm trying to do it up real big and build her a church one day. By the way, Mom, if you're reading this, congrats again on your rcent ordination *hug*
- a "hurry up and have that baby" shout out to my sister Monica. I thought she'd be having my neice before I left, but she didn't, so now I'm just going to have to plan to come back here in 4-5 weeks to be able to see the little one.
- a "Congratulations" shout out goes to my man Travis, who just finished a hellish clerkship with a Circuit Court judge in LA. I swear that judge was trying to kill my boy with all that work, but he survived and now he's getting some quality time in with his GF. Travis, if you're reading this, biggups to you, blackman. *dap*
- a "you're a cool cat" shout out goes to my girl Nina, who has to be one of the illest females on the planet. I met her about 2 weeks ago through my girl "Yoda" (GSB 2007) and was surprised to see that there was a girl out there who was into hip hop as much as me and, even wilder, she's the most "gangsta acting" Indian girl in the world. We've hung out a lot and, since she has been reading this blog, I figured that she was "shout out"-worthy.
- a "Thank you" shout out goes to all of my other family, friends, and coworkers that made this a good summer for The Kid. I'll have a lot of things to remember and smile about while I'm struggling through Corporate Finance in the Fall.