Kickoff with a ‘Dance-off’

180 people strong. It’s the ESADE Full Time MBA Class of 2012. We are professionals from 48 countries with varying intellectual capacities and working backgrounds that run the gamut. We all pride ourselves on our ambition and maturity and consistently find ourselves excelling at things our peers fail to comprehend. We are MBA students….here our roar……and before we know it we are queuing like five year olds on the first day of school sans the pink elephant backpack but clinging to our blackberries instead for security. That backpack was AWESOME by the way-it had ears and a trunk. Anyway, we  board a bus to La Mola for social experiment #1.

You can see fast friends visibly shaken as they are separated alphabetically on the bus rosters and will have to cope somehow. Memories of groups formed based on the first letter of our last names stream through our minds….silently for most. Me, well I share most things, requested or not. The scene at the hotel is organized chaos as we realize we are randomly assigned with a roommate to stay the night in what amounts to matrimonial beds. The ‘men’ rush to put a little bit of separation in between the beds before the surprise roommate arrives and an awkward moment ensues. I introduced myself to my roommate from Japan and dragged her to the bar immediately.

(If I continue with this blog I may have to incorporate a few lies to avoid sounding like an alcoholic, but do not be fooled…we are all leaning that way for the next two years….in efforts to boost our time management skills we plan to sprinkle in a few hangovers from time to time-we’ll call it multi-tasking).

After a nice dinner we all decided to loosen up a bit, but true to form, they had us loosen up with another competition. A flan eating contest, a dizzy bat/beer chugging relay (did anyone notice the absence of a bat and the presence of a metal pole-clear disregard for our safety after the copious amounts of alcohol served at dinner-foreshadowing for the next day) and then there was the ‘dance-off’ judged by a handful of second year students. While all the teams were practicing a coordinated routine I was busy refining my negotiation skills. According to the judges, we finished in second place with perhaps the worst dance of the night. Lesson learned….second year students not only like wine, they can be bribed with red OR white – they aren’t very discriminating.

Cue the post competition dancing and cue the Belgian scrapping the salsa dancing in favor of the more ‘American’ style. There were all types of dancing skills represented but none more fascinating than the Flemish style of ‘dropping like its hot’ and then well, just staying there….on the ground amid the countless number of shattered wine glasses and spilled wine. 180 (more or less at this stage of the night)of us throwing our bodies together like we’ve known each other for years or perhaps wishing we would remain strangers.

Overall a good time, we conducted ourselves like adults, made some bad decisions, lied about them and got the rumor mill going. Then we followed up a night of debauchery with a race in cars constructed by the same fatigued and hungover crowd. No one died, there were some war wounds, but no one died.