Bluche is tiny. Yes, I’ve said that…but I don’t think you quite realize just how small it is. So I wandered around a bit yesterday and took a couple pictures to share with you all.

By the way if you are using Google Earth (which you should be because it is AWESOME) the easiest way to find out where I am is Montana, Switzerland or Sierre, Switzerland. You won’t be able to get fine detail of where I am…but it should give you the general gist.

So…pictures!

This is the main school building with the funky lil fountain and kids playground in front of it. Nice mountains eh?

This is the hotel “Little Paradise”. The employees are very nice, you get free wireless access there, and the food is really good. It’s a great place to hang out away from the whole college kid crowd.

This is the sports field…it’s much larger than the picture shows. You can see a touch of the basketball court and of course…the hugely popular football field (soccer…ahem).

This is Tacot (we all call it Taco). it’s one of the older “dorms” on campus and below on the left is a bar (not run by the school) and to the right a restaurant (nice dining, again not school). San’Nick is the bar and is really popular. It’s usually loud, smokey, with generally awful music. Well…not awful, just too much dance/hip hop for me. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun when you are in the mood for it.

And this is my home! We call it the Ghetto ’cause it is fairly old and run down…but it’s a great place none the less. It’s not too quiet, not too loud, and full of good people.

There will be more to come. And if any of you have requests…let me know.

Although I was a bit ugly sick today I did learn some interesting things about how my semester of Management is going to work. Want to hear about it? I knew you did!

Here is a list of the classes (I think) I’ll be taking.
-Hospitality Managerial Accounting
-Human Resources Management
-Tutorial (I’ve no clue what that is…hmmm)*
-Food & Beverage Management
-Language Special Schedule (I’m guessing this is my foreign language class)*
-Room Divisions Management
-Project (I dunno!)*
-Contemporary World Issues
-Hospitality Marketing
-Economics
-English Support (wow I hope I won’t need that class)
-Facilities Management

Yeah, I don’t quite get it all yet myself. Technically I have 9 classes. I have to get a minimum of 60% in 7 of the 9 classes…and a 65% average for all 9…in order to graduate. But as you can see from that list there are more than 9 classes. Interesting. Well a couple of them don’t have room numbers (*) so…uh…um…I dunno! The bold ones are probably the 9 “real” classes. I’ll find out more tomorrow.

I’ve even already got an assignment. I’ve got to form a group of 5 students and do a proposal to the classes. We’ve got to create a 5 star golf resort and prepare a presentation focusing on three parts….Food and Beverage Management, Room Divisions Management and Facilities Management. Each section requires a 1000-2000 word document (due at week 5…this is the end of week 1), with a 25-35 minute presentation in class with a Q&A session at the end.

Personally I think that is pretty bitching. We’ve got to do serious documentation of everything, and there are a lot of fine details about this proposal. It pretty much comes down to a professional sales pitch…we’ve got to “sell” a resort concept to the facility.

I’ve already got a lil group going…Alex from France, Bruno from Brasil, Robert from China and some girl I haven’t met yet.

For the next couple weeks we’ll all be working together during the class sessions with teachers in sort of “workshops” were we can toss our ideas around and get some feedback.

Beyond that…I’m rather clueless. I’m going to meet with my HOIII head tomorrow and talk to him about being sick. I’m feeling a bit better (good drugs!) but at the same time I still feel pretty crappy…and I really don’t think someone in my condition should be serving food to people. This is a nasty cold.

So I’m going to shut this thing down and get some sleep. Although you can’t really tell that I left. The internet is complicated eh?

Last thing….Jack Johnson is AWESOME. Nice chill music. I’m loving it.

OK…it’s now the morning. I’m still sick (BAH!) but I got a chance to meet with the head of the HOIII program and let him know what is going on. He’s a very nice guy, very understanding…and all is well. And I learned a couple things too.
-Tutorial and Project are just times all HOIII students share in common in case we all need to get together for one big meeting.
-English Support is an open class for those that need extra help with English.
-Language Section is actually only 1 class a week in a foreign language. Since we can take such a variety of language classes they put all the possible class times on the schedule…which makes my class load much lighter…woot!