While each of the national weeks in P2 and P3 would certainly have deserved their own blog post, I have no pictures from those weeks and therefore I am going to keep everything together in one post.
In P2, there was only one national week, because it was the main recruiting period for the previous (July 2012) promotion: Israel Week (16-20 April). The INSEAD students, both organizers and participants, did the best to make it a non-political celebration of culture and of friendship across borders – even though that was certainly not easy for everyone at every time. I, however, had a blast at the Israeli national week activities, especially the dinner, which was certainly one of the more memorable nights at INSEAD, starting out with delicious food and later dancing on the tables at the dinner place, later moving on to INSEAD students’ favorite rooftop bar 1-Altitude and ending with drinks at (and in) the Heritage View pool until way past 3am… but I still made it to class next morning at 8:30am to make sure that future national weeks would still be allowed to hold dinners…
To balance the lack of national weeks in P2, P3 had three of them. The first one was Latin Week, which covered all of the Latin American countries. Since many of those are culutrally prone to partying in general, that of course made sure that we had a good time during the week, including a legendary national week party at Movida in St. James Powerstation (a Singaporean event location with multiple clubs and bars). This party was probably the best national week party so far, with a designated area for INSEAD students in an otherwise public club and an amazing live band with lots of energy performing latin and non-latin pop classics, which was certainly a change from the 20-odd dancefloor songs that are played over and over again at most of the clubs in Singapore.
The second national week in P3 was Italian week. Unfortunately for me, I had to miss the Italian week dinner, because I was sick – and I am sure the food at the Italian restaurant Limoncello was awesome. The party, which took place at Powerhouse (another club at St. James Powerstation) was another extremely crazy event – there were so many vouchers for free drinks around that at one point I was walking through the club with two one-liter pitchers of long drinks… which I didn’t both drink myself, but distributed to other people 😉
The last national week for P3 was Dragon week, which basically covers Chinese culture and was organized by all the people with Chinese heritage and some others with a strong connection to China (such as my former group mate Caroline and her boyfriend who spent multiple years working in China). In Singapore, obviously, we are in contact with Chinese culture on an almost daily basis, but it was still very nice to get to know more about the culture and have a nice dinner with traditional Chinese food with all students together. Also, the national week party was the first one which was in a club that was less Expat-dominated than the other clubs that I have seen in Singapore… which was certainly also an interesting experience.
Tags: China, INSEAD, Israel, Italy, Latin America, National Week