Michelle from Hong Kong visiting the Netherlands - 4-6 November 2006

At the beginning of November I received an e-mail from Christal, my friend from Hong Kong (former Vice President Finance of Hong Kong, currently PWC coordinator) and she asked me if I could host her friend from Hong Kong, her predecessor who completed her traineeship in Romania and was traveling around Europe. I said yes, sure.
After some e-mail conversations with Michelle about arranging the meeting time and the program of the week-end, we realized that we actually knew each other from IC (the AIESEC International Congress) in Germany, 2004. Both of us attended and since we both held the position of Vice President Finance, we had a lot of functional meetings throughout the whole conference.

So, we became very good friends and we visited Amsterdam together. We went to the Anna Franck museum that was a very inspiring experience for both of us. The museum was situated at the former house of Anna Franck who wrote the famous diary about her life as a jew in the era of holocaust.
What impressed me the most is that nowadays museums – or at least the ones of Amsterdam - provide you with an entire experience, not just some paintings on the wall. For example at the Anna Frank Museum I had the chance to watch short sketches about her life, go through her house with a virtual multimedia tool, send a video message to Ryan from the museum and even to buy the book on site, in their special book shop.

During our common visit to Amsterdam, we had very nice chats about many things: Michelle told me that she had bought a railway pass and she had a travel plan to visit every important touristic place, she told me about her trainee experience in Buckarest, about what she was planning to do after the European trip and she even cooked Chinese for me and made me realize what are the special characteristics of the CEE food and cooking methods that are very far from her taste: frying, using a lot of oil, paprika as a type of spice, sour cucumbers (savanyu uborka) amongst many others…
It’s been a great week-end!