new week

monday night i had to work a bit later...11:30pm to be exact. it's a been awhile since i worked this late and in a weird and twisted workaholic way, i sorta miss working late. mainly, i had to stay late because the quarterly earnings result of a company we're covering was being announced and so we had to stick around for that. its too bad because i really wanted to join mary for dinner at Felix in the penninsula hotel that night..maybe next time.

last night i had dinner at this fancy malaysian/singaporean restaurant right in the heart of lan kwai fong. the food was good and the place was nice and quiet. afterwards, i was invited to a friend's friend's birthday get together at a bar (boca)in soho. there i met more new people who are either doing their summer internship at various i-banks, or people who are currently working here. it was quite an interesting hodge-podge mix of people. after talking to some of them, i quickly realize that we have several mutual friends...such a small world, eh? the i-bank world is so small especially in hk. all of us working for i-banks seem to know a friend of a friend. we're probably separated only by a degree or two of separation.

so from this group of people, i met an interesting guy who i end up talking to a lot. what's interesting about him is that he's pretty much what we call an "abc", who grew up in LA and did his undergrad in CA -- but now he's doing his MBA at Tsinghua University in Beijing. usually people from china come over to the US to get their mba and not vice versa. so i thought it was quite interesting to hear why he chose a chinese university over traditional US business schools. in case you're not familiar, tsinghua is one of the best university in china (probably the equivalent of stanford and MIT of china?). hearing him talk about his mba experience was quite interesting because it's significantly different from my US mba experience. what was more interesting to me was that this whole talk reminded me of my senior year in high school when i was in the process of deciding where to go for college...at the time i was already accepted to berkeley and few other UC's...but my dad was trying very hard to convince me to go to the prestigious Beijing university instead....beijing university is like the "Harvard of china" which is a very tough school (imagine the billions of people you have to compete against to get into the university!). apparently my dad did lots of legwork in trying to get me into the university. he also showed me all the brochures and i remember seeing pictures of the dorm rooms (and like any normal 18 y/o - i was not too thrilled of what i saw). to make story short, of course i decided to go to berkeley in the end. looking back, sometimes i wonder what i would be like if i decided to listen to my dad and went to beijing university instead?! probably nothing...but with far better chinese pronounciation when speaking chinese.