Good Wine and Economics of the EU

So today was crazy busy and awesome. I had the last class of my intensive Spanish class, a final in our Economics of Business in the EU and in between, we had the exchange student orientation.

The Spanish class was, well... intense. Every day from 9:30 to 2:30 with plenty of homework, followed by the EU class from 3:30 to 7pm… with plenty of homework. ESADE is well known for its executive language school and these were by far the best language classes I've ever taken. While I still stop and stutter and struggle over the appropriate past tense to use, I feel like I've come further in the last two weeks than I have in the previous 2 years. The 'test' in Spanish was to give a presentation on a region of Spain. It definitely made me appreciate our international students a lot more because usually presentations don't bother me a bit. Today however I was nervous, reading from my notes and basically a bit of a mess. But hey... that’s how you learn, right?

The orientation was pretty fun -- not too heavy, just a couple of hours, a chance to meet everyone I haven't been in class with for the past two weeks and some good basics. Being Spain, orientation started at 10am and then breakfast was served from 10:45 to 11:15 and the whole thing was over by 1:30. ESADE put together a nice welcome pack for us with a back pack, ESADE binders, pens, the essential MBA nameplates and a couple of books on Barcelona.

Then we had our EU final. Now for me, this class hasn't been too stressful -- and whatever stress I have felt has been entirely due to the fact that I've already had 5 hours of class by the time I get there every day. There was a lot of reading -- mostly from special reports in the Economist, so not exactly the lightest stuff, but the assignments were very straight forward. The final was a 1.5 hour essay question with open notes and again, the question was very straight forward.

The highlight of my day however was our economics professor. He had mentioned in passing how his family has a wine cellar, which I guess I understood to mean that they collect wine. What he meant was his family has owned a vineyard and made wine in the Priorat region of Spain for more than 100 years.

So tonight, once we were done with our final, we all went up to the roof and sat as the dusk set in, enjoying a couple of bottles of his family's wine together with some simple tapas. Now perhaps the surroundings helped, perhaps the new friends and the final we just finished all added to it, but the wine was excellent and the ability to sit with such an incredible group of people from every corner of the world was... priceless.