quality time and strike time

This week I got to spend some quality time with a friend from college visiting b-schools on this side of the pond. It was nice to have an old friend explore my new life with me... and at my side meeting new friends and classmates! Our best adventure of the week was definitely getting tapas at the Mercado San Miguel. We ate really different things that I haven’t seen elsewhere, like croquets with mussels, smoked sardines, cured tuna, and barnacles! Take a look! I tagged along on her visit to IE. I had visited the campus in April, but never taken the formal tour. It was fun to get a sneak preview of the rooms I’m sure I’ll get to know all too well in the coming months. 

This past week, I’ve also spent some quality time getting to know current IE students from last year’s Nov. intake. I met up with members from IE’s Consulting and Net Impact clubs. One of my first questions to both of them was how much free time they really had. I wanted to judge whether or not I would be able to juggle afternoon yoga classes at the gym I’m considering joining and the cheap Arabic classes I’ve signed up for. As I suspected, they suggested to limit non-MBA activities, because even with out them, nearly all students have a hard time even finishing the required daily reading. I figure I’ll give everything a try up till Christmas, and then I’ll be able to better judge what works for me. Meeting up with both of them also allowed me to ask a bunch of questions on the respective clubs’ activities, and to get an idea of the events they put on and the services they offer. I definitely plan to be involved in both to the best of my abilities. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, I really enjoy how all of the IE students and representatives I’ve interacted with so far have been so open to helping new and perspective students. There’s that feeling of “I remember being your shoes.” 

The result of one of my meetings with current students: the birth of THE tapa burger - that's hand mixed burger meat, caramelized onions and pancetta, homemade honey mustard sauce, and a bun with special sauce and melted manchego cheese - credits to Isabelle Chiaradia, Justin Randall, and myself!

On a totally different note, today September 29, 2010 there is a huelga general (general strike) in Spain. It is in response in large part to the austerity measures put in place by the Spanish government since the economic crisis hit. I ventured out around 3pm and didn’t see much more commotion than usual. The stores that close at siesta time were closed, and all the others seemed open as usual. I saw a few more police vans cruising around than usual, and less people going in and out of the metro. All seemed calm except for a brief argument between flag-wavers and police down by the Plaza del Sol (the city center where there are small protests most weekends). Last night when I went out to meet some IE-ers from my intake in Plaza Santa Ana there was a pro-strike concert, and on my way home I saw a parade of protestors, but nothing too rowdy. Apparently there were more protests and riots this morning. Here’s the link to WSJ summary in English of the day. I just hope nothing spills over to tomorrow, because I have to travel early! I feel for both sides of the argument. Austerity measures and disgruntled workers are bad for both the employers’ and employees’ personal and financial lives. Hopefully we’ll have a more in-depth economic analysis of this day in one of our upcoming MBA classes!

beer and tapas belly... and other extracurricular activities

A beer and tapas belly... that is what is going to grow on me if I keep up my lazy version of the Spanish lifestyle! Especially since a lot of the yummy tapas are fried, and especially since I can handle beer a lot better in this dry climate than my drink of choice, a good glass of red wine. This is how it's going to be for me in Madrid - beer (always chilled to perfection) to cool me down in the summer, and red wine (that deserves more international recognition) to heat me up in the winter!

Last night I enjoyed a tour of the local cervecerías (beer joints) in my neighborhood with a new friend. Here's the story... so yesterday I'm out on my balcony collecting my dried sheets from the clothes line and down on the ground floor of my building's courtyard is something speaking some American-accented English! And his face is familiar! It was someone I saw at the Dems Abroad meeting last week. What a small world, he lives in my building! I immediately introduced myself and suggested we go get a drink... but he was off to visit the Casa Arabe. "Casa Arabe? As in, 'House of Arabic?' Are you studying Arabic?" I asked. He was! I studied classical Arabic intensively during my three years of undergrad at Georgetown. When I moved to Italy to work for an NGO, the only lessons available in the city I was in cost more than what I was paying weekly for groceries, and so I had to give it up. Just earlier yesterday afternoon, wanting to take advantage of being in a big, international city, I emailed a few language schools around Madrid to see what they offered. And the perfect solution found me! I went with him to the Casa Arabe, got their matriculation information, and visited the lovely little museum and bookstore. The Casa Arabe is part of a Spain-wide initiative organized by the Agencia Española de Cooperación para el Desarrollo (AECID) (Spanish Agency of Cooperation for Development), part of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to appreciate and spread the knowledge other cultures. For example, in Madrid there is also a Casa Africa, Casa America, and Casa Asia.

Tomorrow I'm meeting up with a current IE student and one of my main objectives of the encounter will be to determine how much "free" time I'm going to have outside of school. Then I'll be able to determine whether or not, or when, I can fit in gym time for the beer belly issue and Arabic time for my love of languages!

Landing Days, Dems Abroad, and travel

So much has happened since the last time I blogged! I feel like that's going to be the case during most of this MBA experience!

First of all, last Tuesday I attended one of the Landing Days session the Student Office puts on. Useful information was given on cell phone contracts, bank accounts, apartment hunting, and immigration. Since I had already found my studio apartment, I could fill out the immigration form right then and there requesting my NIE. One thing I really like about all these initial orientation activities is that they combine students from all of IE's exchange and master programs so I've been able to meet people also in other programs. 

Later that night, I went to my first Democrats Abroad meeting in Spain. I was previously a member in the Piedmont/Liguria/Valle d'Aosta chapter in Italy, so I decided to check out the Madrid chapter. I like Dems Abroad for a variety of reasons. First of all, the meetings are great for networking. Case in point, I met an IE professor! Second, because while I might not always follow party lines, I enjoy the philosophical discussions and the international nature of the events put on by the organization. At this September meeting, for example, Francisco Fonseca, Director of the European Commission in Spain, gave a speech on the future of EU-US relations post-Lisbon Treaty. 

The rest of the week I dedicated to making my new little apartment home. That means, of course, a trip to the urban sprawl that is IKEA. I'm still researching what internet contract to sign up with once I get my NIE. I think I want something with a little more umph than the company the school promotes - StudentsPhone, offers. 

I spent the weekend in Valencia with my boyfriend. Thank God for low-cost airfare! He can fly from Italy to meet me in Madrid, and many other Spanish towns for next to nothing. Unfortunately, the Joaquin Sabina concert we bought tickets to was cancelled, and it rained a lot. So not a lot of beach time nor Spanish music, but we did get to meet up with one of my boyfriend's childhood friends and so we enjoyed a local's take on the city... and a lot of paella and tapas!

some good news, and some bad news

The most exciting news... after seeing 4 more studios and 2 shared apartments yesterday, I got confirmation from the landlord of the studio I saw two days ago could be mine! My feet hurt so bad from walking all over the city, I was so overjoyed. It's going to be tiny, but I love the area. I love that I'm two minutes away from shops, restaurants and two movie theaters on the north part of the Fuencarral. I love that I can walk to the campus in 25 minutes. I love that I can walk down to Bilbao and Chueca in 15!

Now the bad news... I went to sign for my Caja Madrid account this morning - no problems and great service there. So to fill up my account with my Sallie Mae loan, I needed to cross the street and talk to the people in the IE financial aid and administration offices. While everyone seemed sympathetic of my cause, there's some computer/bank/technology program, and so my money could be transferred today (if I'm lucky)... or Friday. I was hoping that since the school opened my bank account for me with Caja Madrid, that it could have been an automatic procedure to transfer the money arriving from Sallie Mae into the account. Not the case. I understand, I just hope my landlord understands and will be able to wait for the money until Monday. I'm just a bit, ok a lot, bummed because I really wanted to get out of this hostel. Someone was coughing away the other night and I've definitely come down with a cold and a very painful pinched nerve in my neck from carrying around my laptop everywhere.

Besides looking for apartments yesterday, I went to two presentations put on by the Student Office for new students. The first one was about how to access the online services of the library. The second was a bit longer, but very appropriate for nascent MBAers: "The Sustainable Student" a talk given by Geoff Martin, currently a Personal Trainer in Madrid and formerly an MBA student and Strategy Consultant. I liked that he reminded us to make health a priority. I recently read in the Italian edition of the Harvard Business Review an article by HBS Professor Clayton M. Christensen about managing your life and priorities. One of Christensen's main points was to decide your priorities and stick with them, never allow yourself those "just this once" moments, otherwise after the first slip of judgment or surrender to laziness, it only becomes easier to do it a second time. Martin's talk had a similar theme, but pumped us all up about making fitness a high priority if we don't want avoidable health problems in our late 30s. I checked out a gym by my hopefully new apartment yesterday afterward. It's pretty pricey, so I'll have to evaluate that purchase carefully...

Wishing myself luck for a healed neck nerve and for a sympathetic meeting with the landlord in two hours!

que locura!

Que locura (what craziness) would describe well my first two days in Madrid. Last night, my first night here, was a once a year event called Noche en Blanco. What it involved basically was the city of Madrid throwing a huge, night-long party. There were video and music installations everywhere, museums were open all night and free, and according to El País (national newspaper) over 700,000 people filling the downtown streets. It was absolutely gorgeous, so lively, so fun, so creative. 

The other crazy part - the mad apartment seeking going on in the hostel I'm staying in. Everyone here is looking for an apartment, or at least a room in a shared apartment. I decided right from the beginning to just ignore their phone calls, to not stress myself out if they were checking out the same apartments I am. But of course, I'm asking for tips! I saw one place today in a neighborhood I really like near the Quevedo metro stop. Two issues, one more easily resolved than the other. First, another person is also interested, so the guy who showed me the apartment has to see what's up with the person his sister showed the apartment. Second, and not so big of a deal (or at least I'm telling myself that) is that there's no oven or even convection oven... I figure I could buy a small convectional one... We'll see... I have three appointments tomorrow - two more studios and one room.

off to Madrid!

I'm finally off to Madrid today! I have a round trip ticket from Torino, I'll come back to Italy at the end of the month. The goal of these three weeks will be first and foremost to find an apartment, whether its my own or just a room. Other stuff I'll be dealing with in the next few days will be a cell phone contract, making sure all's good with my Caja Madrid account, and starting the NIE immigration documents.

I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the materials put on the IE Blackboard site in the last few weeks, and anxious about the apartment search. How many people should I live with? IE students or other young professionals/students found online? Alone? But now that I'm actually about to take off, it feels better just to be almost in Madrid... These choices are much better made crawling the streets than scraping away my peripheral vision looking at online classifieds on idealista.com day in and out. 

Hopefully my next post will be about my new home!

i'm so lucky

Yesterday I went to Torino to visit my old co-workers at the Tampep Association. As I was taking the train back to Alessandria through the dark, Italian countryside I couldn't help thinking to myself, yet again, how lucky I am.

My choices + coming to Italy various times for various periods over the last five years have given me so many things... friendships that will last a lifetime across continents, a wonderful boyfriend, great travel adventures, a gastronomic education, and an amazingly complex, challenging and dream (at the time) job.

It was so nice to walk into the office where I spent my time nearly everyday over the past three years. It was fun to talk about how in my absence, office politics have stayed more or less the same, about how everyone's lives are going, and about how the work is increasingly complicated...

Working for Tampep involved many difficult situations, we worked mostly with trafficked migrant women who have been forced into prostitution in Europe. The situations we encountered, plus all the other environmental and political disasters of the world kind of made me really doubt at times the goodness of humanity. But it's stories like my co-workers told me yesterday, for example, of the kind man who helped them pull the Association's little van out of a ditch one night when they were doing street outreach work, or the time when a few local fast food chain employees gave us free extra food at the end of the night to pass out the women we met on street, that make me believe again.

I really hope with the super job I find after the MBA that I can give back financially to Tampep, and to similar causes.

last days of freedom!

I'm down to the last days of my pre-Madrid, pre-IE Business School MBA life! This is my last week of playing around in Italy before starting the apartment search Saturday in Madrid! 

In reality, my "IE Business School MBA life" started two years ago around this time when I started studying for the GMAT,  and I never stop bothering my boyfriend with business ideas that I can't wait to try out with IE's supposedly great entrepreneurial resources. We made a mini-trip to the beach this past weekend... chilling out with this view in sight made me think up of a million ways to find work in a nice beach town.

view of Portovenere from Isola Palmaria beach

But then again, how could I choose just one? Beach town, that is. Better to travel the world working first, see many great beaches, and then figure out a time-share plan... Hehe... The key is to dream big, and that's what I plan on doing throughout the MBA! Good luck to me and my future classmates, especially with the upcoming apartment searches!

loans and learning

Today my Sallie Mae loan should be arriving in the coffers of IE. According to Google, the exchange rate is at 1.2714 euros to USD, not too bad. I'm not sure, however, how that digital exchange will all work out between Sallie Mae and IE, I guess I'll just have to see once I get my hands on my Caja Madrid account information. More updates on that later.

During my blitz of meeting up with old friends and spending time with my boyfriend in Italy, I've been reading Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel. I have to recommend it anyone like me researching a career in the consulting industry. It gives a really great into to the industry's history and tools of the trade. I'll be taking it along with me to the beach for the next two days, maybe I'll finish it between lying in the sun and the train rides.