By Ian Comandao - November 29th, 2009  Category: CCMBA 2010D| Residency 2: Dubai I went over to a friend’s house earlier this evening. A group of people had gathered to, again, celebrate Advent – Swedish style.
I love these small parties. The hosts had prepared gingerbread cookies, saffron buns, and Swedish quiche, which is basically the same as regular quiche, only you have to mutter “hurdy hurgy gurdy” while you eat it. Better yet, we each had a 1.5L bottle of glögg to finish before the end of the evening.
And finally, the pièce de résistance, we each got to build our own gingerbread house using what I can only assume were pre-fabricated IKEA gingerbread boards and decorate it with little gingerbread people and imagine that they were all living perfectly happy gingerbread lives in socialist gingerbread heaven.
This all would have gone into the books as just another evening with too much alcohol and not enough canoodling (ask Niklas what this means), but just before the gingerbread build-off I was in an inappropriately deep conversation with another friend of mine who’s currently working for a German NGO which aims to open up Chinese minds to the realities of human rights and civil liberties.
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By Ian Comandao - November 16th, 2009 Category: CCMBA 2010D| Residency 2: Dubai Well, the Dubai residency was certainly a surprise. And in more ways than one! The pace was certainly not as hectic as London, and for the most part the group was able to go out and actually see the city, find time to know more about each other, and ourselves, appreciate some not so obvious things, and welcome if not tolerate some of the more confusing aspects of living an international life. I’ve mulled over a whole lot of new things from the course of that week, and as the whole experience has left me with a rather dense collection of inner musings, I am left with little choice than to split up my next few blog posts.
This is Part 4 of a series of 5
I may have spent the entire residency with the wrong group of people.
I met up with a friend of mine on the last evening I was there, just before heading off to the airport. I first met the guy some 5 years ago, and he was just some dude, my best mate’s cousin, travelling around the world with his fiancé. Great fella though, we ended up drinking Beijing dry. He went back to Ireland and was about to live happily ever after, up until his wedding was called off right on the day. He moved to Dubai after that.
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By Syed Husain - August 5th, 2009 Category: CCMBA 2010D| Pre-reading: London The official pre-reading period of the first term will start on the 8th of August and end on the 14th when most of us, hopefully, leave to attend the residency in London. In 7 short days we are expected to complete all of the reading materials assigned to us by our professors for the term. All of this is well and good except for the fact that I don’t think the reading material was designed to be fit into 1 week. If I would just count the number of pages we are expected to read I would say it would be some where near a 1000 pages easily. I don’t believe it is possible for me to do this while working full time, so I’m glad that we shall always be receiving our pre-reading packets a little early.
The cash for clunkers scheme seems to be a huge success, Germany’s exceptional performance during this economic period has to be commended. Amongst the developed nations, Germany has probably had the most effective stimulus plans, Which leads me to the state the obvious fact that all stimulus plans are not created equal. I feel every economic downturn has two Keynesian components to it. The government provides financial support to the economy and then produces policy changes to help the economy or prevent another downturn from happening for the same reasons. The next step for Germany will be very important, we have to wait and see what policy changes will be implemented by the German government and what effect they will have on the economy. I’m not sure what kind of an effect the improving economy will have on the government, will politicians be tempted to leave things be? or will they want to show their effectiveness in pushing through reforms? Somehow I believe that it will be the latter.
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