Landing In Lyon

It seems like an eternity ago now.

The GEP students arrived in Lyon in late August, 2010. After giving us a day to move into our new apartments and scramble for food and power converters—Professor Delmar welcomed us all to the EMLyon campus, and informed us that we would spend the next week in a grueling ‘Entrepreneurship Bootcamp.’

It sounded scary, but it wasn’t that bad: we had to write a few essays, do case studies, some pitches and group presentations, and most importantly, start to get acquainted with our new GEP family that we would have to work with, eat with, journey with, party with, sleep with, live with, and see every day for the next 12 months. Like super-mutants, it was the beginning of our irreversible transformation.

As enlightening as our early GEP academia was, I think that for most of us the highlight of the ‘Entrepreneurship Bootcamp’ was the recreational weekend. On Saturday we got to play sand soccer, where the Germans (except for the oafish Alex Breiter) and the Southern Europeans dominated. We also got on stage to perform our dramatic sketches, where the GEP class witnessed the screen-worthy magic of one of our classmates having a pretend-seizure, and Chintan singing and dancing to the theme song of ‘Spider-Pan.’ Glorious.   

On Sunday morning we were instructed to meet at Place Bellecour—the picturesque heart of downtown Lyon—for the ‘Lyon Scavenger Hunt’. They gave us all red EMLyon tee-shirts and name tags, and split us up into multi-national teams. Each team was given a map of the city and a list of places to visit. We were told to take photos, and to somehow express our first impressions of Lyon creatively…possibly in the form of a poem.

This is the poem that my team came up with on that first day long ago, exploring this enchanted city that’s become our home:    

For the record, at the end of the ‘Entrepreneurship Bootcamp’ they gave out the award for ‘Best GEP Poem’ to a very lame 4 stanzas of slosh and nursery rhymes.

We got robbed.

And I really wanted to own that EMLyon coffee mug…

-Sebastian Martin