my favorite gelato and a book presentation

I'm still in Italy, and in the past few days I returned to Torino once again to visit my old co-workers. The first stop I made, however, was to my favorite gelateria (ice cream parlor) GROM. Their flavors are so rich and distinct, I believe, because of the high quality products they use. This time I had their crema di Grom (crema or cream ice cream is essentially custard), ricotta con fichi canditi (ricotta cheese with candied figs), and marron glacé (candied chestnuts). Their flavors vary according to what's seasonal in each month of the year. GROM is definitely a business I'd like to study more in depth. From their website:

"The idea is to apply to the artisanal gelato production, a principle common to all the best restaurants in the world: the purchase of absolute top quality raw materials.
With this purpose in mind, at the end of 2002, Guido Martinetti and Federico Grom set out to search the best that agriculture has to offer, from the Langhe to Sicily and Central America. The standards are strict: only fresh seasonal fruit, coming from the best consortia in Italy and from our farm Mura Mura no colorings or artificial additives, Lurisia mountain water for the sorbets and high-quality whole milk for the creams, organic eggs and a selection of the best cocoas and coffees from central America."

They started in Torino and in the last few years have expanded across Italy, to Paris, and even to New York. While they use biodegradable and environmentally friendly products, my question is, with their geographic expansion, how do they make up for the carbon footprint of transporting all these green products?

This is one example of why I think it would be extremely interesting to study supply chain management if I want to be able to consult on corporate social responsibility initiatives.

What else did I do this weekend? I went to the presentation of a very interesting book called Essere Maschi (To Be Males). The event was part of a series of seminars in a conference put on by the group Maschìle Pluràle, an association of men that now has chapters all over Italy. The group formed partly in response to the feminist movement in Italy in the 1980s to help men "find places and instruments to start a research on their identity, on their relations with women and with other men, on their place in the world, on the perception they have inherited from their bodies, and on their sexuality" (translated from their website). The title of this weekend's conference in Torino was "That dark object desire: the male sexual imagination and the issue of prostitution." My former employer, the Tampep Association, was involved in the events because we help victims of human trafficking forced into the European sex trade. The book Essere Maschi by Stefano Ciccone addresses all these issues. It was interesting because during my three years at Tampep we had always sought to involve more the male perspective, especially to help us reach out to the clients of the women we helped. Hopefully this joint event has helped Tampep in laying down the groundwork for future projects. In addition to all I learned about working with the public sector and about project theory, development, and management, I think my time with this NGO will really help me in business. Working as they say "on the grassroots level" really gives one perspective on all the many various stakeholders in social and commercial phenomena and on the importance of detail in implementing any project that aims for social change.

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.

vacation in Italy

I'm not quite over the jet lag yet, but I've had a few good days so far in my mini-Italian vacation. I'm staying in my boyfriend's new apartment in Alessandria, basically a mini-Torino. It's got that ex-industrial, northern Italian feel. And thank goodness for all those southern immigrants from FIAT's glory days in the 60s because all the good food I've been eating here so far is from the Bella Napoli restaurant down the road! How I do love frutti di mare (fruits of the sea, i.e. shellfish).

Besides putzing around this little town with my best friend visiting from Paris while the bf works during the day, I've also already had the chance to escape to the country a little. One of my other U.S. expat friends and her Italian husband bought a large cascina (farmhouse) this spring in the Piedmont countryside. I was with them when they signed the papers, and then also after when they sat a little shell shocked at a nearby restaurant drinking a celebratory glass of bubbly. I think they got a great deal - huge, already-possible-to-live-in house, vineyard, fruit trees, profitable hazelnut crop... At the same time one of my Italian co-workers bought a one bedroom apartment for the same price in the city!

Take a look at this backyard!

And take a look at the contents of the goody bag I got to take home!

What does all this have to do with my MBA? Well, just coming back to Italy makes me think about the same things I wrote two posts ago - where do I want to live and when? Do I want to make somewhere in Italy my permanent home? Or Spain? Shouldn't I probably be sending informational interview requests now to firms' offices in these places as a priority over China or Dubai? Yes and no. It's hard starting over in new cities, but I also love jumping into new experiences, languages, cultures... So I'll keep discussing and rehashing this subject for awhile until I figure out what's possible, what's the best for my career, what will allow me to pay off my loans and to have a good quality of living.