Florian Hollender | floho.com

So I promised it, huh? Well, well – then I guess I have to deliver! First of all, have a look at the new pictures up on flickr. It is a little set, something from Columbia, but most from the trip to Atlanta. Yeah, right! Hanging around in the pool after classes on Tuesday Michael and I thought it might be a good idea to rent a car for a day and discover the area a little bit. The plan quickly evolved to – hey, we could just go to Atlanta! And so we did. Wednesday is our free day (until September 5th, when our fourth course starts), so opportunity was right there. We started off on Wednesday early in the morning, only slightly drawn back in our timetable by this bloody bathroom door – the locking mechanism had somehow blocked, and we could not get it open… it took some minutes, but then Michael remembered what we all should have learned watching TV: The old credit-card-trick! It works, actually. But don’t swipe it too often, as you get charged each time…. not really. We did not use a credit card neither, but some worthless-whatever-plastic-card. Anyway, all lights green, there we go. To the airport with a cab….. did I tell you that Taxi service in Columbia is bad? It is not really bad. That word does not fit. IT SUCKS! Whenever we wanted to take a cab, it did not show up before we called a second time, complaining that we already waited somewhat between 15 minutes and half and hour. The drivers are mostly really nice, though… there was this guy asking us if we wanted to “get in contact” with a girl that was eager to learn German…. I declined politely, fearing that this could turn up to be a) more about French and b) Expensive. But I am drifting away from the main story! The driver we had to the airport on Wednesday was nice. He had the radio cranked up, the walkie-talkie cranked up, and then tried to have a conversation with us, speaking to an imaginary person somewhere on his left. It was a bit hard, but after I minute I caught enough of the words to make my own version of his story and reply to it – it was something about a preacher that said on his TV show (hey, church is popular here!) that people not agreeing with him should be killed. Well, it’s not too difficult to mutually agree with a cab driver or whoever that this is not the appropiate way to resolve differences. We came from this to that, always something church-related, but when I mentioned that maybe women could be preachers as well…. that was not really a good idea. The driver quickly informed me that by this-and-that chapter of the bible (he actually asked me if I knew that part…. hell, I can hardly tell you all prophets) this would not be His will at all. OK, who am I to question the deep belief of a cab driver?! That was strange anyway. The ride to Atlanta was just normal. Having arrived there we parked downtown, just a few blocks away from the Centennial Park, our first stop. It was built in course of the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, and even the Lonely Planet honoured it someway. It was not really worth too many looks. Just a park, but in the theme of the Olympic Games. I guess that while they were still on, it was a great place to be, but now it was not really special. Right across the park is CNN Center – the Headquarter of CNN. That was fun! It is a huge complex that accomodates huge parts of CNN – CNN.com, CNN in Spanish, CNN Headline News, lots of Researchers, Writers, and so on and so on. We got some Tickets for the Tour across the Studios, and that was a nice thing to do. Unfortunateley we were not allowed to take photos in the interesting places, and also were we always seperated from the studios by windows, but hey, I don’t blame them. Otherwise it would hardly be possible to do a tour every 20 minutes and still do actual work there. We got to see the big newsroom of CNN which is in the background when the anchorman/woman reads the news, the studio of Headline News, the studios of CNN in Spanish, and caught glimpses of the anchors that actually were just live on camera. Seeing them live and on screen at the same time was funny. After the tour we took off to Lenox Square – the biggest mall in Atlanta. There is not really something to go shopping in Columbia, so we just needed it. Really. We spent some three hours there – you can see my picture of the Apple-Store on flickr – and it was a good time, some really interesting stores, crazy stuff like a “national geographic” store for example. The way home was normal, just like in the morning but darker. Poor Michael had to do all the driving because signing me up as second driver would have made this much more expensive, so I tried to stay awake to keep him awake Then we hit WalMart in the middle of the night for some more shopping – this time no pleasure stuff but water, diet coke, more water, some chips and a new matress for Michael (he is 2 meters and the bed right now is only 1,8…).

On Thursday, would you have guessed it – I was tired as hell. Classes were fun anyway, and Prof. Schweiger in consulting was back again, as last time with some really funny stories and interesting insights to consulting practice. In the afternoon I think I wanted to do something, but I could not help it and fell dead asleep.

Friday, what did I do on Friday? WAITING. The whole day. Friday the cable guy would come, but the appointment time was not more specified than: between 8am and 8pm. Great. He showed up at 6pm, when I had already given up hope. Installation took only some five minutes, and there we are: 80 TV channels, and damn-fu*ing fast Internet!!! We went out after the first celebrational downloads of “doesn ‘t matter, just checking out the speed” and explored The Vista, the second part of Columbia to go out. We enjoyed it more than Five Points – nicer restaurants, clubs, bars, and a big variety. We had a really good Pizza at “Mellow Mushrooms”. They offer a variety of about 50 beers: I choose “Monthy Python’s Great Tale Ale” (imported from the UK, obviously). It was nice, and it was strong, so I stuck to Coke for the rest of the evening.

Saturday, aka yesterday, we hit the road again, went to the supermarket, checked the bookstore for some stuff Michael had ordered, searched without success for a sports store and sweated like hell in the sunshine. In the evening I got to join one more session of Pool-Rugby with some people from the fourth floor – that was fun again.

Today? Oh well…. hanging around on the pool, watching three episodes of “Overhaulin’ ” (comparable to “Pimp My Ride”, but less monitors and more work on the engines), following the live news of Hurricane “Katrina”, blogging to you guys. That’s about it

Now please excuse me, I got to try on more flavour of “Mike’s Hard Lemonade” and look at the same sattelite-picture of the Hurricane for the 12523st time today. Have fun – life is great!

Now this is what I call a successfull Monday. We started off at 10am, but not to go to the classroom – oh no! We don’t have classes on Mondays! We had a little To-Do-List and worked it all down. There was an issue with two courses that we could not elect – Carolyn, our Advisor at Moore School, resolved them immediateley. Now we are enrolled in that fancy wednesday-evening class, which actually is part of the Executive-MBA curriculum. NICE. We strolled through the different bookstores to see where the readings for the classes (we have to buy the books) were cheapest. Well, they are cheap nowhere, but at least we could buy one book for 75 Dollars which costs over 100 new. Now I spent over 200 Dollars just on Books, and there are minimum 100 Dollars more to come for another reader. I did not realize how lucky I was at IPADE in Mexico – from there I have folders full of Harvard-Cases, here I have to pay 75 Dollars for 13 of them. That’s outrageous! Sorry dad…. that’s really not my fault! Then we went and ordererd our TV and Internet. That’s pretty cheap, for the first three months we only pay 70 Dollars in total, but we had to make a 150 Dollars deposit for “security”, because we don’t have Social Security Numbers and therefore cannot be trusted at all. Sure… Michael bought himself a US-Card for his mobile phone, and in the end we wanted to get in the queue to get some free tickets for the football-match at September 1st… but well, what can I say – people lined up for at least 200 meters. No kidding – those who came in first at 7:30 still waited two hours. The weather was really getting bad by then, so we decided there must be another way to get some tickets. We have not found one yet, but maybe we’ll just buy some for gods sake and get around all the waiting. I am really eager to go to that match, though: Yesterday when we made a little walk in our area we came across the field where the marching band, the cheerleaders, the girls with the flags (how do you call them again?) and others were rehearsing for the show for the match. That was really impressive. I think at WHU there are not even enough students to get together such a croud, let alone so many talented people. It was amazing to see this huge crowd moving in exact sychronization to the music, following their individual paths on the field – while playing music, dancing, throwing the flags around, and so on. I am really looking forward to seeing them in the stadium – that must be great. Today I also finally got to talk to Christine for a bit longer, and that was the best thing of the day. The day was good, but talking to her after some days of “only” emails, it was just fantastic, and I think we made the most of this half an hour. She enjoys herself down there in Buenos Aires and has a really good time – already learned more Spanish in one week than I did in a month I guess, she’s just a natural at so many things – it seems like everything comes together just fine for her, and that makes me happy. Of course I am afraid that her having seen the world championship of Tango dancing from the first row might put me under some pressure to learn that dance – but I could make clear that what I cannot do I do not like, and that I therefore pretty much hate Tango, guys who can dance Tango and the whole Tango-Bango-Wango-Thing and refuse for now and forever to like the music, like the dancing or even engange in it. I was soooo serious about it, but you should have heard Tine’s laughter Well, we agreed on less Tango and more Situps – which is an Insider that you don’t understand, and that’s fine. With me. And Tine. Having all these expensive books now puts me under some pressure to read them…. well, yeah, I will actually. I plan to do so. Most of the stuff is pretty interesting – regarding the cover art – and maybe it will be some fun. Has to be more fun that most of the reading I did at WHU, but that is no big deal to achieve. I hope you all are doing just fine wherever you are – Tine and I are having a great time on two continents (but nearly the same timezone, which makes life considerably easier), and I wish for all of you to be just as happy as we are. See you tomorrow!

Hey folks! Thursday was the first day of classes. Michael had arrived at 1am, but still got out of bed easier than me…. I refuse to believe it has something to do with the movie I saw till 3, that can’t be!

First we got into an Human Resource class about Employee rights – that was not what we wanted to hear, but we had misread the timetable (I had), and the Professor was funny anyway. I have to admit that I always said “hey, HR is interesting!”, but my interest in the topic is rather picky – do the funny stuff, don’t bother me with the basics. I guess I won’t be an HR guy then, and won’t take the class.

Next one was Internet Marketing with an Professor from India. I bought the class once he started talking about what the course was about. Hey, I actually knew something about the companies he mentioned! Talk Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay to me, and I smile and live a happy life.

After another 15 minutes break, which is roughly enough to get into the elevator and go to the other classroom (The business school is situated in a 80s-concrete- 7 floors – building, a bit old, a bit ugly, but it does the job), it was time for Supply Chain Management. I really enjoyed the Production and Service Operation Management-Course I had last semester, so I think it will do me good to learn some more about how things get actually done, and not only how to sell them. The Professor is really enthusiastic about the topic, highly involved with corporate partners, and he has a good sense of humour, too. It will be some work to do, but I think it will be worth it.

Last class I attended was my now-absolute-favourite: Consulting and Organizational Development. I LOVE this class already. The professor runs his own consulting company and spends about 3/4 of his time out in the field doing business, then comes back and teaches about it, so what I get is real, hands on experience. We did sort of a question-and-answer hour today to get going, and it was so much fun and so insightful that I could not help but smile all the time. It was such a great experience, sitting there in class, being able to talk about exactly the questions that I ask myself, getting advice that I could hardly get at WHU until now.

So this is the three classes I enrolled in: Internet Marketing, Supply Chain Marketing and Consulting. A fourth is still to come – there is a course on wednesday evening that my advisor here at Moore pointed me to. It’s simply called “International Management” (which means, I assume, lots of talking and little facts), and it is broadcast out of one of the studios at Moore to all other campuses of USC all over South Carolina. I could not sign up online for whatever reason, but I think I will get that settled tomorrow.

My timetable will look like this then: Tuesday from 11am to 4:45 pm, Wednesday from 6pm to 8pm, Thursday from 11am to 4:45pm. Weekend from Friday to Monday. (In theory, I mean I will have to do some work out of the classroom ). I think I can handle that…. compared to Mexico, where it was 9 to 5 from Monday to Friday, it is quite a step forward.

The only thing I really don’t like: I just had a look at the weather forecast, and it seems like we would only get some 33 degrees today…. HAHA! Just kidding. I hope it does not get much hotter, but eventually it will. As always, chances are way higher that I get burnt than tanned, but I have not given up the hope yet. Go to sleep now, have a fabulous Friday!