There is such a thing as too much education

I basically spent every waking hour of every day the last week doing something for school. Ok, that may be an exaggeration, but only slightly.

Even though our accounting test was last Wednesday, we still had another group assignment to turn in on Sunday. We were obliged to download annual reports from a few companies, make an analysis and state which one we would invest in and why. Friday we met at our faculty building to work on it, and put in a couple of good hours. Then one of our groupmates said she had leave to study for a different test she was having (on a Saturday, of all days!). She wanted to go to the Giardini Margheriti and invited us to all come along if we cared to do so. Who can pass up doing a little accounting work laying in the sun at the public park on a beautiful day? Not us, that's for sure. So we stopped on the way, grabbed some sandwiches and some beer, and decided we could get in a good hour and a half more of work before the laptop batteries ran out. Well we may as well have called that plan 'Of Mice and Men', because after a sandwich and a few beers while sunning at the park, the plan to study did in fact go awry. We just ended up chitchatting, and I even managed to get in a good hour long nap in the fresh air. It was really great to get out and enjoy the weather, because after that day it turned to crap again.

Saturday was more of the same groupwork; that is, with the exception of a returned cold snap, because apparently more than a few days of spring at a time is too much to ask. We met again in the afternoon to work on our project some more (this time at a friend's house, NOT in the coma enducing sun) and got quite a bit accomplished before dinner time rolled around. Some friends in a different group had invited me over to have dinner with them and asked me a couple questions about English usage for their report (which is a pretty common request). So I had a nice quiet little dinner with their group, and that was my Saturday night. I had to meet with my group again on Sunday to finish the report before 8pm, which we just BARELY managed by the skin of our teeth. It was a pretty... interesting... day, to be sure. When I left the house that morning I was running late already, like always, but then the bus (which normally comes every seven minutes or so) didn't arrive for 20 minutes. I could have walked halfway to my friends place by that time, but oh well, whatever. So we get to the main road, hit about two stops, and then the bus driver comes over the speaker and says that we won't be making the normal route today because there is a freaking marathon going through the town. So instead, the bus detours in the opposite direction of my destination, setting me back another 10 minutes. When I finally got close to the house, there were a bunch of little stalls and kiosks set up in the street outside with various vendors and such, of a typical street fair type. It seemed cool, and we checked it out a little bit when we came down from the building to have a coffee break. There was even a guy with a whole roast pig, head and all, from which he was shaving off bits with a knife and making sandwiches. However, the coolness factor wore off as the evening dragged on, with the festivities going on outside and us holed up indoors doing our accounting assignment. There was a live band practically below our window, playing mariachi-esque latin music and Brazilian dance beats. I joked that if any Brazilian dancing girls showed up while I was stuck doing accounting, I would commit certain violent acts against our professor which decorum prevents me from listing here. Well wouldn't you know it, we looked outside about ten minutes later and sure enough, there were some Brazilian dance girls in full-on carnival outfits dancing away outside. I cannot stress enough the injustice I felt at this juxtaposition. Well, we ended up finishing our paper at 7:58pm, a scant two minutes before the deadline. However, in the ensuing scramble to have one of us actually submit the work to the instructor via email, it suddenly dawned upon us that working on three separate files on five separate computers with two different operating systems and Excel, Word, and Open Office files that all had to be converted to PDF format was *not* the most logistically sound plan we could have gone with. Expletives were flying in four different languages, flash drives swapped frantically from hand to hand, those with weak constitutions panicked and fled while old women wailed and children were crying... ok, a bit of exaggeration, but at one point I felt it necessary to add to the palpable drama of the scene by playing 'O Fortuna' on my laptop speakers. We finally got the files sent, and afterwards we were ready for a drink. A couple of us went to the local Irish pub and had some beers, but classes were starting back up at 8am the next day so we weren't out late at all.

Monday was another longgggg day of classes, and next Monday will be the same. We are finishing up the lectures for our Market Regulations course (basically legal issues with international treaties), and we also had a computer lab for our statistics class and the first class of a *new* accounting module. As much as I hate accounting, this new professor seems really cool. He's an Australian guy with a pretty impressive resume that teaches at a couple of different Universities here in Italy. He comes off as a pretty laidback kind of guy, and his teaching style is a LOT more similar to the American style I'm used to than the Italian style. After classes were finished at 6pm, I tried finding a place to get my hair cut. A few times before I'd passed a little place near where I live with a sign in the window that said "Asian Haircutters - 6 euro". It sounded delightfully shady enough to try, and the price was right, so I wanted to give it a shot. My haircuts are so simple anyone could do it, so I figured I could at least explain a basic buzzcut in my bad Italian to a Chinese person who also speaks bad Italian. Unfortunately it was already closed by the time I got there, so I had to try the next day.

Tuesday we just had our 8am regulations class again, then met for a bit to discuss the group project we must complete this week for that same class. We finished early enough that I could reattempt getting my dangerously-close-to-hippy locks taken care of (this is my first haircut since arriving six months ago, by the way). I went back to the same place, which was open this time. But when I walked in, I realized 'Asian' doesn't necessarily mean Chinese/Japanese in the rest of the world. It was, in fact, run by some Indian or Pakistani guys, and I was definitely the only non-'Asian' guy in there. But, six euros is six euros, so I decided to stick it out in the hopes that a) they were not terrorists intent on using sharp barbering instruments against infidels (less than friendly areas of the world are a lot closer here, mind you) and b) my short stature, brown hair and eyes, and backpack would sufficiently portray me as an Italian student and not an American infidel. Well they were perfectly nice, and did a fine job cutting my hair, so I was quite happy. I spent the rest of the night researching stuff for our market regulations paper, then it was up again at 8am on Wednesday for class and group meetings again until 6pm.

Nothing is uneventful here in Italy, even a simple group study session. We met in a room at a library which was not the usual one we would go to for studying, however, it is attached to our building, the Faculty of Economics. I had sent a text message to one of my friends in the group saying we were in the economics library, expecting him to show up pretty soon. Well after a short delay, he finally arrived, and promptly informed me that he thought we'd gotten lost because, in fact, we were in the Business Sciences library. Confused, I asked which was the Economics library - well, it's the one we normally go to, except we always just call it 'Bigiavi', for the person it's named after. My next question was, obviously. why the hell is THIS the Business Sciences library, attached/inside of the Faculty of Economics building, while the Economics library is across the street and the Business Sciences building is halfway across the city? The response, of course, was: well, because this is Italy. I should have known. And the ridiculousness only grew as the day passed: as the afternoon rolled by, we could hear a voice coming over a speaker outside. I figured it was some kind of demonstration, as is fairly common here. But after it continued for a good 30 minutes, I decided to get up and see what the hell kind of demonstration would be going on in the late afternoon outside of a library, of all places. Well, turns out, it was just some lone lunatic, on a bicycle, with a loudspeaker, yelling about electroshock therapy and conspiracies or some such nonsense. At first I wondered why no one at the school bothered to go tell him to shut the hell up, but then I realized it was after 3pm and there probably weren't any administrators left working in the building.

Today was pretty cool. The school set up a business game for the students through an outside company which goes around the world hosting these kinds of competitions. We were divided into teams and are pitted against each other via a computer program that simulates the effects of choices in several dozen variables for all different aspects of a finished-goods production company. It's actually pretty fun! We choose stuff like how many units to produce, which materials to buy, money to spend on promotions, opening new stores, hiring staff, training, etc etc etc. We get to see the effects quarter by quarter and adjust accordingly as market shares change dynamically, consumer trends vary, and our stock prices change. Today we just did a practice run and then two quarters of the first round game. Our team actually did the best in the practice round out of both the first year and second year students in our program, but so far we're in second place for the first year students in the actual game. Whoever wins after two more quarters in the first year students will face off against the winners in the second year class. It sounds pretty boring, but it's actually really cool to be able to apply a lot of the concepts we have been learning about. The only thing that kind of sucks is we only have about two hours to make decisions for each quarter that passes, and it isn't nearly enough time to accurately analyze all the vast amount of information the game simulates. Well we played from 9am to 6pm today, and tomorrow the same schedule is planned, after which we are having a little party and going out to celebrate some birthdays for a few classmates, so if all goes well tomorrow should be a pretty awesome day! Ciao for now.