Life in Switzerland and a vist to Ukraine,

First, I am sorry I haven't written in so long, apparently since March 17th...
IMD
After that week we had our first round of exams a brief break and then started our second building block. More accounting and finance, some organizational behaviour, political economy, strategy, innovation and product design and a few others.
Admittedly the second semester was more relaxed than the first, but still very busy. We learned a lot in our courses - but we also continued to learn a lot about ourselves and group dynamics. This building block's study groups were way more relaxed. It could have been that we were all really tired, or maybe we learned how to manage group dynamics a bit better - to look beneath the surface and see "what's really going on" as one professor might say. I have to admit sometimes it felt like we were dual majoring in psychology.
The good news is that the entire class passed our exams in the final building block in June.

Ukraine
We had a 4 day Friday to Monday (2nd weekend in April I believe) break in between the two building blocks, and I, a friend from class, Paul, and his friend Sne, decided to visit the Ukraine, and Chernoble. I have a friend from the PC, Sarah, that was living there at that time, so she helped us organise the trip. Kiev was beautiful, lots of beautiful buildings, shops, restaurants and clubs. However overall, the country faces a lot of the same problems Bulgaria is facing now - poverty, lack of infrastructure, corruption, lack of opportunity for youth - outside the capital.
Another friend, Rebecca, from the PC was also visiting Sarah at the same time, so it worked out nicely. All 5 of us took a 3 hour drive to Chernoble Saturday. It was a really powerful and sad place to visit. There are several memorials to the people who died during the explosion and to those who were involved in the clean up. Even eerier was the wall of names commemorating those who died, with space still left for those still there and will die soon. Immediately following the disaster people were paid several 1000 dollars a day to be involved in the clean up effort - a death sentence - but because of the economic situation, people took on and still take on this work - because it will allow their families a chance at a better life. Immediately following the explosion workers generally only lived for a week, now the time is somewhat longer, but people still get sick.
1 of the reactors was still functioning, but due to be shut down soon.
The town were all the workers lived was an upper class city built to be a model city, complete with an indoor swimming pool, is now a ghost town. That evening, all the inhabitants were cleared out, forced to leave everything behind as it was contaminated. The architecture, as in all former communist blok countries, is the same - identical to Bulgaria, which gave me a strange feeling. It could have been any of the towns I had visited previously, only here there were no people.
We were not allowed to walk on the grass, because it was contaminated. All the moss in the area had turned red from exposure.
We passed by a town which had to be buried because of the contimanation level. Everywhere we went, we had a radiation meter, measuring the alpha and gamma levels - so we would know how long we could stay at a particular place.
The disaster occurred in April. In May was to be the town's holiday, as each town in Eastern Europe celebrates a day for the town, and the residents were preparing for this celebration. The reminants of this are still in place - a bumper car area and a a brand new ferris wheel.
The 3 hour drive back to Kiev was pretty quiet, all of us tired, and also contemplating what we had just seen.

That evening we went out - and I had the unfortunate incident of leaving my wallet in the taxi on the way home - loosing all of my documents. So- Sunday was spent in another Eastern European police station. It is almost good I always had to register in Bulgaria, because now I am very familar with how these places work. I also learned that I can understand about 60% of Russian.