Consulting life is over... and I feel nostalgic already!

So, it's finally over. Two years of counting down the days and suddenly it's over. I thought I would feel very happy, but somehow I became sad and nostalgic yesterday.

It might have something to do with the lovely farewell evening my team prepared for me. First, an archaeology PhD team mate of mine who had worked as a museum guide before gave us a private guide through the Glyptothek, one of the most famous collections of Greek and Roman statues worldwide.

After that, we went to a cool Israeli restaurant. It's quite original, on the toilets they play yiddish language courses. I had a kosher t-bone steak and a lovely mint salad. Then people heaped presents over me. One present was a book published in 2006 "Cool restaurants in London", it looks very promising and I look forward to checking out some of those places.

We stayed there for 4 hours talking, laughing and drinking Israeli wines. It turned out 3 of the 5 I was with had studied in Chicago (two at Northwester, one at Univ of Chicago) so they were telling stories of Chicago, which gave me certain ideas for the exchange term :-).Then the client project leader who was also with us (he's our age) told of his cycling tour from Bolivia down to Chile, pretty impressive.

So obviously I was very touched what a nice evening they had prepared for me and got a bit sentimental. One thing was very sweet. When we said goodbye, I told the partner i was a bit sad to leave now, he said "Forget McKinsey, just enjoy yourself", which I found very sweet.

This morning I was supposed to go to the client's offices one last time to say good bye but a funny thing happened that prevented it. Just before the museum tour was going to start I went to the toilet and it turned out the zipper of my skirt had broken, so I couldn't close it anymore! After ten minutes of useless effort I called the archeologist girl who came down with safety pins. We fixed the zipper enough for me to participate in the rest of the evening, but I didn't want to show up at the clients offices with a skirt held together only by safety pins :-). They couldn't fix it in the hotel (at least not in the given time frame) so I went back to Hamburg in the morning, with the plane full of Italians (Italy plays in Hamburg tonight).

I'm curious about how I will feel the next days. I guess a mixture of nostalgia and relief.