Thursday, January 24, 2002

Day Four - MBS does it in style!

Despite having Wednesday afternoon off, I was still mentally exhausted when I got up on Thursday morning. Having broken my coffee plunger earlier in the week, I was unable to get my caffeine fix, and it took me longer than usual to get out of the house. After experimenting with a couple of public transport options (I've been testing out the Melbourne train system this week) I eventually arrived at the b-school about 45 minutes late for the first session.

We continued our discussion on diversity, did a couple of exercises including an analysis of leadership and decision making in different cultures, and then broke up into smaller groups for our individual presentations. My presentation, Adrian's personal guide to domestic air travel in Australia went down fairly well with my audience, but I was outdone by a brilliant presentation by one of my Indian colleagues on Arranged marriages in India. For some people, this was the first time they'd ever present in English.

After a quick debrief, we then waited outside for the buses to take us to a mystery location ... an hour or so tour of Melbourne eventually took us to the Stokehouse in St Kilda, a fantastic restaurant right on the beach. MBS had booked out the entire top floor restaurant and we were treated to champagne, wine, beer, an amazing variety of seafood, cocktails, and other dishes. Standing on the Stokehouse balcony, absorbing the sunset over the bay, and chatting to my new MBA colleagues was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. However, when my colleagues started buying rounds of Scotch at around 10:30pm, I knew it was time to go home...

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