ok i guess i owe myself an explanation for my long absence on this thing and then suddenly trampling in with a bad temper.
so much has happened since. london is a bit of a disappointment, my fluffy wonder of being somewhere new and exciting has been wiped off the table pretty quickly. things are mad expensive here, and transportation is so very inconvenient. i've been blocked out by the tube at least twice on weekends because of maintenance. then i had to go around looking for bus routes because taking cab home would cost about 40 BPD. At a 2.11x USD exchange rate that doesn't make me very well-off even with an IB salary. food is bad (except during training, 5 star is still relatively up to par), weather is cold (did not bring enough appropriate clothes), been suffering mild insomnia (the sun coming up at 5am and setting at 9pm doesn't help), mountain-load of work (hmwk every night, exams 2x a week, 50 slide pitch presentation), living really far from my intern friends from past summer, being homesick sporatically and not being able to call my friends (and consequently being a bad friend), everyone around me being all competitively edgy (reality check has finally hit me), being strategically landlocked in my relationship with RZ...and so forth...
on top of all this, our head hr reminds us almost everyday that the market is bad and how much we should be grateful for being with db and enjoying a training budget that has not been cut... 'tis true, the ubs' training is made much inferior due to all the losses since the birth of the credit crunch. i am grateful.
everything else is good actually. all the IB corporate perks have lived off the reputation. i'm not quite sure why i'm not as happy i should be. maybe because of the disconnection with all the good memories/friends from last summer... so much rupturing has taken place within banks, between banks... friends from last summer no longer laugh as innocently as we used to... everything is meticulously done in a mist of caution and diplomacy. it makes everything all the more challenging, but i hate it. oh well, the show must go on.
...or maybe it's the adaptation of seducing (used in a professional connotation) a new crowd that's completely different from the CS one. being mandarific everyday (a new term i made up for speaking mandarin 24/7) and exposing myself to so much hmm, "asian-ness" and hardcore politics. the CS/UBS internal rip-up is not making my networking platform any easier either... another DB girl got engaged last weekend...a lot of um...rock-comparing going on. lol.
hmm, how do i explain everything else. i can't. either they have not matured into the publicity stage or i haven't even figured out myself what is really going on. my work-life balance right now is all work and no life. yet i know this is what i want. or what i should want. i sound like a living contradiction. hmm. oh well.
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