Though the sun has finally appeared this afternoon, the weather this weekend has been dreadful, raining heavily non-stop. I seized the opportunity to visit some of London's great and free museums and could not have had a better weekend. Today I went to the exhibition Global Cities in the Tate Modern Gallery. The cities featured were the biggest of them all, Tokyo, and furthermore London, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paolo (see photo by Andreas Gursky on the left), Istanbul, Cairo, and Johannesburg. The exhibition mixed pictures, videos, maps, satellite images, interviews and architectural models to illustrate themes, such as density, diversity, or speed. I'm a big fan of photography, but also enjoyed some of the videos a lot. If you go to the website of the exhibition, all the videos and photos of the exhibition are actually up there to be accessed by anyone, it is definitely worth it.
This is another collection of photos I liked. It shows the gates of gated communities and rich people's homes in Johannesburg who live behind fences hiding from the poor. These gated communities are only at their infant stage in London, and I don't think they exist anywhere in such a form in Western Europe, but given the crumbling of the social security systems in Continental Europe, I would not be surprised if we have gates like these in Berlin or Hamburg in 20 years time.Yesterday, I went to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, another free museum. It is amazing that all these world class museums in London are for free, but I'm sure they make a lot of money from their museum shops and cafes and restaurants (certainly from me anyway - I couldn't resist buying this Ally Capellino bag designed for the Tate Modern shop!). I loved the section on Primates, which contains many pictures and videos of monkeys around the world. Some of them are so cute. I hope I can go to East Africa one day to see them live.
The rest of the weekend I either slept, went for dinner with friends at Busaba Eathai in Mayfair, which is delicious, cheap and has a nice atmosphere. Now I just need to meet a friend in the pub and then I can call the weekend history :-).
The internship is still fine, I'm learning how to buy infrastructure assets and companies with 80% leverage and how to find potential deals, which is quite useful. Next week I even have to travel to Germany for two days to meet with the management of a potential target. Lifestyle continues to be very good, and I don't expect it to change over the next weeks. Overall, a very nice summer so far, I just hope the weather gets better so I can go to the coast next weekend.
6 comments:
Angie, it's not related to this last post, but I'll take the chance to ask you: you did an MBA in order to work in Finance at the most prestigious MBA in UK/Europe. If one wants however to spend 1 year only, would you rather suggest a 1 year MiF at LBS or a 1 year UK MBA (Oxford/Cambridge) in order to target finance and why? Oxbridge has a real nice reputation, but not sure if MiF is stronger overall. Any advice welcomed.
Angie - the museums are all funded through the government one way or another (so taxes beyond that). I think the Tate may be slightly an exception to that.
Glad to hear you enjoying London - I have been here a few years before moving to NYC.
Tate Modern is one of my favourite places in London. I can't get enough of it. :)
Angie, thanks for the kind words on my blog.
looks like you're having great time in London)
anonymous, i would say a MiF in London is better than an MBA in Oxbridge for the purpose of getting into the good investment banks in London. But I would still go for the MBA at London Business School and just cut it short by taking more electives. You can cut it down to 18 months, and these already include 3 months of work for a bank in the summer, so it is really 15 months of school vs. 12 months in a 1 year program. The cost of course is still the same :-).
Thanks angie for your reply. Unfortunately a MBA at LBS would be still way longer that I could afford to be out of work, given my age.
For a career in sales & trading or a career in capital markets or private equity, would you go for the MiF or for the Oxbridge MBA, given that perhaps Oxbridge have a great brand but perhaps lacks the connections of LBS? Thanks again.
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