Last Event of the Year @Stars'N'Bars

Friday was my last event as Student Association 2011-12! I organized a Open Bar Cocktail from 6 to 7pm at the newly re-opened Stars'N'Bars Monte Carlo.

It looked nice and new, looked more high tech with the automated doors and balconies!

We had the area behind the bar reserved for us and a total of 50 students attended the event! :D 

 My friends and I had dinner at an Italian restaurant called Mozza and then went out to a dance lounge, Zelo's, and then to Monaco's famous club, Jimmyz. It was a super fun night and now that I've spent the weekend resting, it finally feels like holiday! 

 

Off to Sacramento, CA, USA on monday! 

End of the 2nd Year of University!

I can't believe its nearly May already!  This week is the last week of university this school year because IUM only has two terms and I have to go do a three-month internship from June. Which also means that I have final exams! Last week, I had my Italian final exam and this week I have European Union, Marketing, Professional Writing exams. 

For our Entrepreneurship class, the teacher is making us present our business idea to 3 investors (who also came in during the term as guest speakers) and they will grade us by whether they would invest in the idea or not. So we have to be all proper, wear suits and convince the judges but we only get 10 minutes! Scary, no? :s Especially because I get so nervous for presentations, our professor told us to EXPLODE and do as if we were singing on stage (he'd seen me singing at the Christmas Ball)! So the plan is to practice tomorrow with my partner with a couple of RedBulls or a glass of whisky ;) heheh

For the Finance class, we had 3 quizzes throughout the term and the professor had said from the beginning that if we got good grades in those, he would put that average as our Exam grade so that we wouldn't have to take the exam! And well, I managed to get an average of over 100 (with bonus points) so, no finance final! Yayy

When all of this is over, I get a month of HOLIDAYYY!!! xD I am SO looking forward to it because I'm going, for the first time to California, US!! 

I've been to Hawaii, Guam, New York, Miami, and recently Boston, but I've never been to the West Coast and I'm super excited. 

My bf is doing his internship in Sacramento, so I'm going to visit him and drive down to San Francisco and LA! 

Which means.... I can pack all my summer dresses and bikinis! It's been really cold in Monaco this whole month it's crazy! So I just can't wait to lie in the sun and not worry about studying... 

I am coming back for the Grand Prix though! Monaco Grand Prix this year is from the 24th to the 27th of May and I fly back on the 25th. Our apartment is located just above the GP circuit tunnel and from our balcony, we can see the cars flying out of the tunnel. So we have a great lunch buffet party every year and invite our close friends from all over. I can't believe it's already been a year! 

Ooh and April is Birthday month for our family. My father, my grandmother, my sister and my mother were all born in April! (Of course, I'm the out-liar, I was born in January) Anyway, check out the chocolate cake I made for my sister this weekend! It was really good!! nom nom! 

By the way, Stars'N'Bars is re-opening tomorrow! I organized our last university event this Friday 27th there too and we are all super excited to have our favourite American Restaurant Bar back! I hear they now have very cool balconies and a dance floor?! 

http://starsnbars.liferiviera.com/

Inside Job

I was watching some more financial films for our finance class and finally managed to watch the documentary, Inside Job. I say "finally", because my friend and I attempted to watch it last year and we fell asleep because it was late and it sounded complicated. But now that we've learnt about financial institutions and markets for a whole term, we understood everything they were talking about and recognized a lot of the people in it. It was so interesting, I couldn't keep my eyes off! And we kept pausing, taking notes and shouting "What the heck is wrong with these people?!". There were SO many people/institutions involved in the 2008 Financial Crisis! And everyone who helped cause it KNEW that it was wrong! They wanted a short term cash gain at the cost of their firm, the tax payers, the home owners and the whole world economy!
Wow.
Anyway, the film was very well made! It is a little difficult to follow without knowing some financial terms because the financial people they interview try not to answer the questions directly by using complicated words. haha.

I also watched Rogue Trader, suggested to me by an MBA student at IUM who read my blog. Thank you! It was interesting because unlike some of the other films, it was fictional and showed how a guy tried to cover up the losses he made, making him look good at first but ends in the collapse of the bank and his own life (he ends up in jail, his wife leaves him). and the sad part is that he didn't manipulate the accounts for his own profit, just that he didn't want to admit the mistakes he made and kept thinking he could beat the market. Well, I guess you just can't.

Art Monaco 2012

Happy Easter! (although I don't celebrate christian holidays...)

It is a beautiful day today in Monaco and my friend and I decided to go to an art exhibition that is on this weekend at the Grimaldi Forum. (http://www.artemonaco.com/)

 

I believe this exhibition, of over 50 exhibitors from all over the world, is held every year now. We were invited last year too and my mother and I enjoyed the lovely art scene at its Opening Cocktail event. This year, unfortunately, we could not make it on Friday for the opening but I managed to visit the booths this afternoon.

The friend of our family who invited us, has her own atelier in Monaco and her exhibit was impressive with a great installation at the back of the booth with these "wish bubbles" hanging from the ceiling (Picture below).

It was really pretty! And each wish bubble has a wish written inside and as you walk down the corridor, you can't help trying to read all the wishes inside them! 

(http://aibubble.com/)

Looking forward to next year!

WOW!! Technological World or what??

I just read on Mashable.com about some crazy new technological stuff! By "stuff" I mean Google Glasses, Wireless Charging and Windows 8 touch interface! 


First of all the Google Glasses. I don't know if you've heard of them but in my IT course, we discussed about the possibilities of Augmented Reality. Ok, here's a google definition:"A technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world, thus providing a composite view" but basically it is like seeing reality through a device which gives you additional information! for example, holding your smartphone up and through the camera, it tells you where the restaurants are in the street opposite, or glasses with face recognition etc. In class we looked at this YouTube video:

When we watched it not even 6 months ago, we thought it would be something that will become true far in the future...
BUT apparently, Google already has a prototype and Google's Co-Founder, Sergey Brin, was wearing one the other day! How fast our world is moving forward!!! 

http://mashable.com/2012/04/06/sergey-brin-google-glasses/


Also on Mashable.com, I read how Apple was getting the patent for wireless charging of devices! I don't really understand how it works but the fact that this kind of thing is possible is just wow... Read the details on AppleInsider.


And the news of Windows 8. I'd heard that there was going to be another version of Windows soon from my mother, and we were laughing how by the time I'm 50 there'll be a Windows 208... But seeing this video made me think, "huh... I kind of really want to try that..." AND IM A MAC PERSON!!! Soon we'll all have both a mac and a windows just because they are both so awesome!! 

I haven't read the specs and details about windows 8 so I don't know if it really is gna be this awesome but they sure did a good marketing job in that video! Haha

Spring Arts Festival at ISM

Yesterday was the Spring Arts Festival at my old high school, International School of Monaco. It's basically a Talent Show, where all the kids come up on stage and perform.
My little sister, who is attending primary school there, was in the Cheerleading team and they did a performance so my mother and I went and watched all the other 3 hours of performance to watch our little girl dance with 10 other girls for 3 minutes...

Anyway, the show was a lot of fun and it made me and an old friend of mine I met there were saying how old we feel because we were up there singing and dancing only 2 years ago (I sang an aria from an Opera 2 years ago). Now we are grown up, going to universities coming to watch the show for our little brothers and sisters!
I also realized how the school had become a lot more musical! When I was there, there weren't so many acts and so many students performing! It was great to see a lot of talent and effort and it made me want to run home and practice my songs on the piano! Of course I came back and wouldn't stop singing about even though it was already past 10 pm :P

Anyways, the weather's looking better this weekend in Monaco so let us enjoy it this weekend with some beaching and tanning? ;)

Cinderella Man, Social Media Marketing

Today, I decided, after a casual conversation in one of my classes to watch the film "CInderella Man" starring Russell Crowe and Renée Zellweger. It was a film about a washed-up boxer in the 1920-30s getting a second chance and winning the world heavy weight championship. Made me tear up towards the end... I am quite easily moved by emotion... 


Another thing that makes me want to tear up is watching figure skating competition. I don't know why but the beauty of the skating, the cold ice, the challenge of the jumps and pressure the skaters have on them... (also the fact that i am a terrible ice skater makes me feel respect for people who can jump around on that thin piece of blade!!) 


The World Figure Skating Competition this year was held in Nice and since Japanese ice skaters are almost always at least in the top 5, Japan is very enthusiastic every year about it. I've been watching the National and World competition for the past 5 or 6 years now and I have become very pro (in my opinion lol) at analyzing the jumps etc. hahaha. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go to the competition, but the rest of my family went and they said it was a great experience :)


The weather today in Monaco was not very nice and it's been forecasted to rain this week. It's a shame because we went to do our Marketing Research project at La Note Bleue restaurant in Larvotto beach but it was so cold and it looked like it could rain, we decided to head back to the university. 


Our project, by the way, is "To determine the effect of Social Media on Consumer Awareness of Hotels". We have to conduct a survey and other data collection methods and write up the findings and analysis as if it was our thesis. Only thing is that we can work in a group, but I spent the whole day today doing some observational research as to which hotels and hotel groups have what kinds of social networking sites. The results are pretty interesting because I predicted that a lot of hotels have Social Networking Sites like Facebook and Twitter, but I never expected so many to have their own channel for YouTube and Blogs! I guess I had undermined the Social Media Marketing blooming within the hotel industry too!