clinging and movin on.

paris is a beautiful city. but it's too smokey. too much cigarette smoke. but there's also good food and drink. and i think we've only seen the nice side of the city. champs elysee, the louvre, arc de triumph, pantheon, eiffel tower, pompidou, notre dame, chateau de versaille, gau de nord, st michel, mouffetard, the tuileries, monmarte, rambuteau, moulin rouge. all the places are nice and historic and probably preserved by the government or some tourism agency. but i guess tourists will never know what the French feel about living in Paris, in France, under their own regimes. it probably takes more than a semester of exchange, getting to know the locals, experiencing the random strikes, protests and bad weather and subtleties of being french. of pronouncing 'R's as a very nasal "H'. and getting to love the metro and RER systems and the perks and privileges of following the bebes. the charms of paris lies in the historic monuments, the time-honored piles of stones, boulders and 'esmeraldas' that preserve the glorious past of France.

i guess it was rather disturbing that Paris was the first city that came to mind when i thought of France. For such a big country, i wonder what happened to the rest of France. Embodied by the Bordeaux and Burgundy which the rest of the world knows as wine or beef. or maebe that's just the picture of themselves that they want to paint to the rest of the world. or perhaps the rest of the world just cant be bothered enough to look beyond the vin and viandes.

off to munich and rome. time to move on to other cities. paris had been fun but like new york i guess its a little too overwhelming for my liking. the little messiness just grates on my nerves, not unlike that of tokyo. perhaps that's why i would never like the hustle and bustle of huge cities. the sheer number of people will get to me somehow. sometime.

im glad that the semester is over. no more crazy organic chemistry lab reports and incomprehensible hamiltonians and phenomena or tedious stat homeworks. despite all the harsh curves and crazy workload, im not sick of chemistry. i guess that's good but im not exactly eager to start the next part of physical chemistry. perhaps there should be more organic and organometallic classes but i guess we are required to have some grounding in all the traditional approaches. so while im not super excited about pchem2 and pchemlab, or biochem for that matter (all that intense memory work), i shall go with an open mind.

1 semester of wharton classes and i dont see how wharton students are in any way better than your average college kid, engineer or nurse. they sure are different, and that applies to each of the 4 undergrad schools but i cant see how all the extra resources and privileges that whartonites get are justified. the general sense i get is that whartonites are pompous, artificial and unscrupulous but i guess that can be applied to some people in the college too. thing i dont get is how wharton is rated as one of the top institutes in the world. and then there's that kind of cold, heartless financial analysis, which even puts a number on intangibles, which i find rather questionable. and a certain professor in a certain class seems to believe that the bottom line is what matters at the end of the day and i find it rather disagreeable, if not unsettling. then are inappropriate values at the core of the recent sub-prime crisis?

before i put down the school too much, i must say that ive enjoyed bpub, where we had some rather interesting discussions, less the AA comments of those who tried to impress but fell flat on their faces. but the way i see it, not many are in the class for the intellectual rigour or academic challenge. oh so-and-so is an easy grader and so-and-so gives out tons of A's. grades are paramount and they would do whatever it takes to get there, which undermine learning beyond a certain point. suffice to say, there are some classes where i think ive learnt alot but am not expecting a stellar grade. and they dare to compare a major to a concentration, which is only slightly more than the required work for half a minor. i decided to give wharton a shot as i felt that in a world where money reigns, it is important to have some form of financial grounding. but the more i see, the greater the disappointment.


i suppose in a setting where finance is the norm and everyone is fighting tooth and claw to get that coveted bulk-package offer, a lot of things get lost along the way. promises, goals, aspirations. how, in any way, would a position in any IB or consultancy solve any of society's problems? had there been more bpub, hcmg, envp and social impact concentrations, would we still be where we are today in terms of poverty and inequality? what happens to a world in which the supposedly very best shun the path of government and public service and keep their gifts to themselves? why did this come to be? the more i look at it, the more i feel that the all those noble causes are in vain if they do not affect profits in anyway. if eradicating homelessness in philadelphia reaped billions, the problem would then be identified as promising or full of potential. instead, it is left at a socially optimum level, where those who want to buy/rent shelter at a certain price can do so. those who do not want to? im sorry but u have to dig a hole in the blizzard and hope that the ice insulates u from the cold.

Everything just go away...