Le Palais de la Biére

There is a place in Lyon called "The Beer Palace" and their advertisement says that they offer 300 different kinds of beers. We went out to check it out.
We arrived in "happy hour" which is until 9pm. The friendly waiter sat us to a table and then we ordered or I better should say "then we were ordering". He asked each of us what kind of beer we like, what beer we haven't tried before and brought us samples of what he recommended to us. Quite nice job, he devoted to us maybe 20 minutes for one order! So this was auite a drawback, we were dying of thirst until we could finally order. And also he said to me that I should not taste the sample he gave to Lucy because then neither of us will get the taste right. So I brainstormed with her and came to the conclusion that if we want to try the beer of the other we need to keep it in our mouth and kiss... okay I am just provoking you ;)

The beer was of course good - as always is. The only thing that prevents me from beiing a returning customer (besides time-consuming ordering process) is the price - 4-6€ for small, 8-10€ for large?? This was definitely the most expensive beer in my life :) Luckily I am going to see Prague in two weeks so I will visit numerous real palaces of beer that are there! Because for me, being a king of beer means that I can get more than two glasses in one evening ;)

Nourriture... or what do I eat here

French cuisine... famous in the world!

First week I arrived I was eating in canteen of Ecole Centrale which is in the same campus. A menu for 2.8€, that was not bad for entree, main dish, desert and bread. I have to say that the dishes vere usually quite good tasting. But the steaks! Bloody hell! If you like your steak RARE then this canteen is the right place for you to eat. But I like mine MEDIUM WELL so I don't eat in canteen anymore. Am I really that principled person that if I experience once something I don't like, I don't come back trying again?

So now I more or less cook for myself because other places where to eat are quite far and more expensive. Well sometimes Jannik cooks for me his special and famous Spaghetti Carbonara (very near and absolutely the cheapest option :) and sometimes I have something small in schools cafe. But most of time, Carrefour is my ingredients supplier and I am the main chef.

My most favourite thing to cook is STEAK HACHE. Frozen steak, 1kg package, 10 pieces, quick easy, cheap and it's red meat! Everytime I come back from Fitness I want to eat this source of proteins. Plus mixed vegetables, broccoli, cous-cous or just bread, 15 minutes to prepare and finish eating.

Then it's PASTA. Million of variations - pasta carbonara, napolitana, bolognese, with pesto, with corn, with chicken meat and cream, with olive oil and olives, with mushrooms, with everything previously mentioned...

And SALADS. With tomatoes, olives, mozzarella (48 cents:), tuna chunks, boiled eggs and bacon strips, add vinagrette and olive oil and its done. Last time I also bough some norwegian SALMON + fresh dark french baguette and had it with the salad. This was the best thing ever!

I cannot forget small chocolate+vanilla cream desserts from whole milk, chocolate croissants, perfect muesli and fruit youghurts. I have to admit that Carrefour brand makes really good products! (Hidden advertising in here. Unfortunately without remuneration.)

All of these things are pretty basic and quite cheap because they are sold in larger or multiple piece packages. But they still taste very nice. When I recall my troubles while being in USA with food from stores that had no taste (or everything tasted the same), contained a excessive amount of sugar or salt, everything was sweet (meat, milk, bread) France comes as a much more better country to live. That's why "French women don't get fat" (name of quite famous book) - because they don't need to eat expensive organic high-tech low-calories natural-grown trendy food and they still eat much more healtier than American women. Well from what I see in my school, French girls are quite okay, you-know-what-I-mean ;)

At last, don't forget you eat to live and not live to eat!

Presentation... f**k it!

So today we finally had the last presentations for the most important subject this term - the mighty BUSINESS POLICY.

The course was very good (not like us :). It covered the basics for any businessman - Industry analysis, Porter's five forces and value chain, GE or Boston Consulting Groups matrixes. I think every student of "economics" should know about these things. For every manager or consultant, they represent the same as a Bible for a priest or Kamasutra for a lover. ( I don't know these books :)

But in Prague, University of Economics, we have no idea what these things are! I mean we have subjects on finance, accounting, management... but actually no one teaches us how to look at the company we work for, our competitors, our environment to survive, to make money, to profit! How to make business! Which is our future job, I suppose.

This is still a very wide difference between "the western world" and our "transition country", at least in school. We are not taught how to analyse the sitation we are in, to be creative, to make decisions, to be entrepreneurial, to exploit our capabilities, to be successful. We learn "how to know things". I hope that this is gonna change a we will also be able to develop and progress economically thanks to persons that are not just "studying so they are wise" but persons that study "to find a way how to put the ideas into existence".

Okay that's it. The big credit for today's presentation goes to Jannik. When presenting, he forgot his vocabulary for a while and while unable to finish the explanation, after 30 seconds he desperately said: "fuck it. sorry!". I was in tears :)
Jannik. Of course, in the bowl there is wine!

Happy Hour Today

What a cool idea to do happy hour evenings every Wednesday in the school's bar! We might have two bars in my university in Prague, but they usually don't serve as a place for parties. They are boooooring!

Here in EM Lyon, the bar is run by students that have been elected to do this function. The team changes every year or so, I think. So when the bar begins to us ("students"), active and creative people, doing something more than just serving beer is quite understandable. So that's the reason for the happy hours :)


The elections for many of the school clubs take place every year and are preceded by pre-election campaign. Basically, the guys in charge for this year give some rules to follow to competing teams to embarass them in the school. At least I think it's like this. It has been almost two weeks since the those students are running in school with plastic dicks or red girl underwear on their heads and doing funny dances during the breaks....

Okay, this is not very interesting! Right now I went to TV room to see football game between France and Slovakia. What a coincidence :) The French were very sad that thay have lost 1:2! This is quite lucky for me that Slovakia beats France maybe for the first time ever... and it brings me into a good mood when I am here!

Week of skiing drinking in the Alps

I'm back from a week of "skiing" in French Alps, accurately from "skiing" in Val Thorens. Of course I was not alone! A typical Erasmus group - Germany, USA, Slovakia, Czech, Mexico, Spain, France, Finland, Lebanon - rented a very nice "gite" (mountain house in France), brought several cases of beer (and everyday needed to buy another few), put the sauna on and was enjoying one week of university holidays.

On "skiing":
The resort was heaven! I did snowboarding as always and enjoyed it a lot. Back-country snowboarding (going off slopes) proved again to be one of the best things on Earth, when you float on the snow like a surfer on the ocean wave. Only bad thing - the victim of the week was Mike (the American) who has been stolen second snowboard in this season - at least it wasn't Burton this time!
On Torino Olympics:
Been there - nothing special. We passed 14km tunnel de Frejus between France and Italy (40€ return ticket!) and parked a car in Bardonecchia where snowboarding events took place. Regular tickets for the day were sold, we have been offered better seating for 90€ (oh sure) or to go and see curling finals (oh sure). So we better took train to Torino. City was quite nice, but I think Firenze or Venice have much more to offer. Nobody besides tourists spoke English (I wonder how could they organize Olympics there?), people were eating icecream and life passes as usually in Italy - no problemo. In the evening, Lou Reed ("Perfect Day", Velvet Underground etc.) throw in a concert and the atmosphere became much more appealing to me!

On "other activities":
I mean drinking of course! So many drinking games we played and they all worked out. One of the highlights would be "Night of Marco", the mexican boy. When we went asleep, he woke up, and stepped on Martin sleeping on the floor, not because he was drunk but because we were 15 instead of 7 in the house. Then he dropped a wooden ladder on him, Martin cursing in English-Czech already. Suddently, I hear Jeff shouting: "Stop it Marco, you cannot piss here, stop pissing!!!". Hehe, Marco, drunk as he was, went to the neigbouring room and started to piss on the floor next to sleeping German boy. In the morning, he couldn't remember anything, but he was for sure the first Mexican to piss on a German!


For this, he was punished by Lebanese commando everynigh since that by becoming their "charmutta" (a bitch) ie. been attacked by guys in bed, sauna, everywhere :)