Buon Natale

I have been having some Blogger problems and have not been able to log in, but am back online now!
Its been a lovely Christmas. Its cold here in Sarnano, but the sun is shining and the sky is blue. On Christmas Day itself we actually had to go in serach of the snow - this must be the first year when there has not been white stuff on the ground outside the window - and I had promised Connie and John - who were over from Hong Kong - a white Christmas! So we jumped in the car and headed up to Sassotetto. The sun was hiding behind large black clouds up there most of the time, but this didn't deter us from lobbing a few snowballs or from drinking our champagne which we had brought up for the occasion!

The rest of Christmas Day passed in a festive way - with a viewing of A Christmas Carol starring George C Scott (the classic version) and much wine and festive grub. Presents were exchanged around the Christmas Ladder - I couldn't bring myself to buy a tree only to throw it away in the New Year - so I had decorated the bamboo ladder that I shipped from Hong Kong in the Summer, and put all the spare baubles in bowls around the house. Before I had the idea of the ladder I thought I would just decorate the furniture, and started hanging decorations everywhere. I am sure that sometime in June I will find a stripy-stockinged reindeer hanging off a piece of furniture I had otherwise forgotten about!
Connie and John left on the 27th after a Boxing Day trip to Servigliano to see the ice rink and the living nativity in Sarnano, and a wonderful meal at thealways fabulous Restaurant Duilia in Snat'Angelo in Pontano. This little village is Englishville and a lot of the people I know here are put off from going there as a result, but the place is amazing overlooking the whole valley from mthe top of the old castle walls (circa 10th century) and with Pappardelle con Cinghiale (wild boar) that makes my mouth water just typing it!
The journey to the station in Ancona for Connie and John's train was a fast one - gathering pace at the end as we flew along the A14 counting the minutes until the train left. That we made the train in the end was thanks to the rally-like driving, the Smart ForFour that I was given byt the hire car company but which is actually very nippy, and thanks also to the brilliant autostrada - you may have to pay for it, but the road is straight, the tarmac good - well worth it!
Yesterday I hit the stores with Irene, a friend from San Cristoforo, near Manadola, and in the evening we hit the ice rink then went for Raclette at her house - it really feelslike Christmas other than the fact that my family aren't here.
Tomorrow I am doing the 4 hour drive to Rome to spend the New Year with some friends from Hong Kong at their house on the Lago di Bracciano, now famous thanks to mr and mrs tom cruise.
More in the New Year, but until than, Buon Anno a Tutti and all good wishes for 2007.

And the news is… there is no news

A strange sight on RAI’s TG1 tonight.
I tuned in for the news at 8pm – after L’Eredita – a terrible yet strangely addictive game show that ends with a contestant who has to choose 1 word per pair from 5 pairs. For each wrong answer, the amount of money they stand to win is cut in half. Once there are 5 words available, the contestant has to write a word that links them all together.
I have never seen anyone win anything on the show.
So I knew tonight was special, as the contestant won E50,000. Very strange.
Then the news started, and the usual anchor was nowhere in sight.
The first item on the news was…. That the journalists are on strike. The stand-in anchor proceeded to read the statement from the editor – in which it was made clear that the journalists were standing to lose a portion of their salary and their pension too, “in an incomprehensible manner”.
Then we had a few headlines, read from paper sheets (I presume the teleprompter was likewise not in work) and no pictures.
The subjects covered included Berlusconi and Prodi – Berlusconi always seems to get first billing still now – a few words on Palestine and the murders in Suffolk, then a few more words on the strike and the journalists.
Then the next game show started.
Being a Hong Konger, strikes are not a common experience for me, but in Italy, there seems to be a surfeit of industrial action. The bus drivers have been striking regularly in Trieste since I arrived – at least 5 times since September.
Luckily, Massimo now takes me to school, and he doesn’t strike!

When the bora blows

Finally, the bora has arrived (although the Triestines tell me it is still speeding up). It is really cold when it blows, and the rain is washing down too. Overall, we have not had a bad run - the winter so far has been far better than expected, and the guys at the meteo (for some reason often in uniform on Italian telly) say it wont last.
I hope this is true as I have decided to drive down to Marche on Thursday as I will take some Christmas goodies from here for Christmas.
I am also trying to track down Giorgio, my geometra, regarding the work that is being done (I hope) on the apartment in Sarnano at the moment. They are supposed to have done the stairs internally before Christmas, when Connie and John will arrive from Hong Kong. I have heard nothing from Giorgio - and sometimes with Giorgio no news is bad news! I have now sent him an email in Italian to try to get some news...

Hitting the town again

The Masters in Tourism and Leisure finishes for Christmas today so they are heading out for their Christmas party. Some of the MBAers are meeting up with them later, some not, but either way there is a meeting at Bar Stella near Piazza Unita at 10pm. I imagine we will hit the bars for a while and may even do some dancing...
Mandracchio is our local nightclub and it is about as cheesy as discos get. I have been a few times so far, with my friend Walter who is irresistible to many Triestine ladies, so is always fun to be out with!
Mandracchio is a perfect example of Italian bureaucracy.
Situated in the corner of Piazza Unita, it is easy to spot the club. There is a pig pen for the smokers outside – no smoking inside in Italy anymore, so its always occupied – and there are 2 bouncers on the door.
Although these are bouncers in the loosest sense of the word, they are not very discerning as far as I can see. If you are daft enough to want to go in, you can.
You queue up, and get a ticket from the boys in black as you pass them.
This says “Drink” – which is an instruction, not a suggestion.
Then you are in!
Down the stairs to the coat check – an obligatory service in this part of Europe where the temperature inside the clubs is approaching 33 degrees and outside its currently 8 degrees at night (and falling).
At Mandracchio, it’s Euros 1.50 to leave your coat, for which you get another ticket.
You are then able to hit the dance floor or go for a ‘giro’ – a prowl around the place looking for likely candidates to dance with. The music is Europop at its corniest, but the great thing is that everybody dances.
This process continues in rotation (giro, dance, dance, giro) until it is almost time to leave.
At which point Walter tears himself away from the ladies and we go to get a drink.
The drinks are 7 Euros, whether you ask for a coke (Walter) or a vodka and orange (me).
And you have to hand in the “Drink” ticket.
The drinks arrive along with another ticket.
“Exit”
Again, we take this as an instruction, not a suggestion.
So out past the guardaroba (hand in other ticket, get coat) then up the stairs to the bouncers.
Who take the Exit ticket, then we can leave.
In other parts of the world, they just charge you a cover charge to get into the disco. I think it can only be here in Italy that hitting a nightclub involves 3 official documents and 5 official transactions.

Last Exam Before Christmas

Finally, we are done with exams before Christmas. Yesterday was Supply Chain Management - a strange multiple guess exam that everyone thought was easy, but which probably means few of us have passed!
We went out for an end of exam drink in the evening, but a combination of the cold weather and the tiredness meant that it was a quiet night with no-one on top form. It is definitely time for the Christmas holidays - we all need a break.

Winter Wonderland

Its getting really cold at night now - the thermometer said 8 degrees last night, but it felt colder to me! Vlasta and I went for a walk after the exams in Piazza Unita and around the Christmas market so I finally managed to take some photos of the trees. It is gorgeous at night and there is Mozart playing at the same time. It feels very European - a bit like a film set! I am waiting for people to start waltzing around the square.

Finance on the Up

Unbelievable news - a B in finance. Huge thanks to Luca, to Hakan and to Joyce who helped me enormously. I am not going to change my career direction, but I am delighted with the result! Another exam tomorrow - supply chain management - but we are celebrating on tomorrow night!

Christmas Party

We are planning a Christmas dinner. This will be next Tuesday at a restaurant called La Tecia, downtown in Trieste. For 20 Euros a head we have starters and pasta, wine, water and coffee. We will run a Secret Santa and generally get into the Christmas spirit - long overdue.
The city is looking beautiful, especially Piazza Unita which is full of Christmas trees, and white lights and has classical music playing. There is also an iceskating rink that I have not hit yet, but I plan to before I leave for Marche. Look out for pictures!

Busy Days

An apology to regular readers, it has been absolutely hectic, and I have not had time to write so much. I have been doing exam after exam, the MBA game has really been played at maximum capacity! We are all pretty tired and for a while the cracks were starting to show. But our last exam before Christmas is tomorrow and after that we are counting down to the holidays.
I am not sure what to put about what I have been up to since I last wrote - winetasting in Cividale and the UK trip seem a long time ago now!
There was the problem of the finance exam (3 hours of number crunching, and I am not sure it was any more successful than last time, although I did manage to get an A in my resit which is great!). We will get the results tomorrow.
We also did a strategy presentation on insurance. I have attached a pic of the team before the presentation.

We will stop working together as a group after Christmas and we are a little sad about it - we are a good group and have very complementary abilities and personalities. But the whole class is great really, so although there will be some upheaval after Christmas with the new groups it shouldn't be too bad.
We have also had a marketing exam - a multiple guess affair and a bit of a collaborative effort between the class - its the Italian style of examinations and a big change for me! Very collegiate!
We also went to the alumni dinner for ex MIB students. This was at a German restaurant downtown (of which there are many - a throwback to the Austrian routes of Trieste). The pic shows the dinner - more pork and sauerkraut than I have ever seen on one plate. I didn't make much of a dent in it if I am honest!

We did manage to go out dancing afterwards, at a bar called the Colonial Cafe, near Piazza Unita in the centre of town. Its Trieste's answer to the Far East - with Buddha statues and raffia fans on the walls. But the people and the music are pure Italian! It was a lot of fun, and I think will be the first visit of many when we are less busy....
I have also finally managed to get my hair cut - last weekend in Slovenia with Vlasta. It seemed strange going abroad for a haircut, but is a big improvement! We had a lovely relaxed girly weekend, not too much studying, but we are all tired and cant keep going on forever at the same rhythmn.
On Sunday we headed back to Trieste, and I spent the afternoon at a degustzione (wine tasting) with Ciccio and Massimo. Massimo knows a lot about wine, and Ciccio and I were avid students! It was a great afternoon and the setting was gorgeous, in the Stazione Maritima congress centre with a view of the sea and the bay. As the sun set we went out on the balcony with our wine. Fabulous and a nice way to end a relaxing weekend, even if we felt a bit guilty about the lack of studying going on.
Yesterday we went on our first visit to a company - hitting both Electrolux and ACC in Pordenone, about an hour away from here. I have attached a pic of me and Lovro from Slovenia outside the factory. After an hour inside we were pretty happy to be back in the sunshine - it is a tough life for factory workers - and a mention must go to the lady who was sitting alone checking the paint job on washing machine bodies one by one for 8 hours at a time. A real incentive to keep up the studying.

Weekend in London

Last weekend I went to London to celebrate my Grandad's birthday with my family. This is the first time that I have done a run to the UK from Trieste, and it was surprisingly easy - and cheap!
I took the 0630 Eurostar to Venezia Mestre, then the bus to the Marco Polo airport. By 9am I was checked in to my Easyjet flight and ready to go.
The journey back was also simple, although I got back to the apartment at about 2am, so Monday seemed like a long day.
The great thing about the trip (other than catching up with my family) of course! was that the flight was only 60 Euros!

Enoteca Nanut

Last night was a quick aperitivi session for Daniele's birthday. I wasn't intending to go originally as there is such a lot of studying to do right now, but having had the finance resit (easier this time I think - we will see) I decided to have a night off. Like all good aperitivi it metamorphasised into a much longer session than we intended. In a radical break with tradition, we moved away from our normal La Portizza / Bar Marino routine to a small enoteca named Nanut, just around the corner from the market where I buy my fruit in the mornings.

Nanut, curiously enough, is also the name of the Dean of our school with whom we had a meeting over drinks and doughnuts today. Italy tends to be pretty formal so this kind of informal chat was a new thing for the school and for a lot of the students too, but it went well and I think we will do it again.

But Enoteca Nanut was lovely - a really wide selection of wines and a gorgeous setting with stone walls and a big wooden bar. Massimo - in the front of the picture above - is our resident wine expert and picked a fabulous red from Sardegna for us to enjoy. In usual Trieste style we got lots of free nibbles, including hams and cheeses to mop up the vino - this is a necessity as we rarely have time to eat dinner these days as we are at school til late.

An All Time TV Low

Wednesday night was an all-time TV low. Il Megliore Miss Italia was a quiz show that pitted the 'brains' of the different Miss Italias throughout the last 20 years against each other. Truly appalling TV, yet strangely addictive the night before a finance exam!

Group shot

Its really very busy here this week. I have been doing a presentation on Red Bull, one on Fabtek (seaarch online for the Harvard Business School case if you are interested, its very dry) and working on my insurance presentation for strategy. All in all there is a lot going on, and not a lot of time. I did get a good result in the strategy exam last week - when I managed to get an A. But whilst on the subject of exams the Time Value of Money resit is tomorrow, following 4 hours of lectures on Finance and a presentation from L'Oreal who are running an MBA competition called the e-strat challenge.
So with all that, there is not a lot of time to write on this blog!
Instead, I am attaching a group shot of me with some of my colleagues at the wine tasting trip on Saturday.

Tocai No More

An interesting trip to the vineyards near Cividale on Saturday. It transpires that the famous local Tocai wine is now Tocai no more (or at least from April 1st 2007). There are 2 types of Tocai on the market at the moment – the Hungarian version - a sweet wine and the version from Friuli – AKA Tocai Fruilano. The European Union has ruled that this latter version is to lose the name Tocai from April, at which point it will become simply Friulano – from the Friuli region. Obviously this presents a marketing challenge for the producers, who historically are fiercely competitive with each other and have not been working as a region – this is now changing. In the name of research, I have been trying the Tocai before it becomes obsolete to see if it is worth drinking. So far so good – give it a try before it disappears!
The case of Tocai also highlighted another interesting point. My Italian friends struggle with their use of the letter ‘h’. A little like Cockney people, the Italians add ‘h’s where there are none, and don’t use them when they should. Which made our Tocai discussions an interesting linguistic challenge as they were angry at Hungary…
The picture was taken at the end of the day, after a lot of wine tasting, just after a rousing rendition of a Beatles medley!

Call me Doctor....

It turns out that in Italy you can take the title Doctor as soon as you have a university degree. I have always harboured a secret desire to have the title Doctor. Now I can do it without the inconvenience of having to do a PhD!

Clementini

I am absolutely addicted to clementines. I have been buying them on the market near the Canale Grande in the morning, and bringing them to school, where I eat them like sweets!
It is different from HK here, as in HK you can get the same fruit more or less all year around. Here the seasons are much more noticeable - when things are in season, they are glorious and omnipresent - when it is getting to the end of the season, they look pretty sad. But right now, the clementines are fabulous, and the whole class is munching through kilos of them every week. A bag of about 30 of them is about Euro 1.60 so they are suitable for a student budget too!

Hard at work

Its been a busy few days, and getting busier. I am writing this at 1915 Trieste time, and many of us are still at school and anticipating being here for a while. We are drowning under the weight of group assignments, reading, revision and so on - and that is before we try and figure out the mundane bits - washing, ironing, shopping and so on!
The weekend did provide a little chance to let off some steam though as there was a party for 5 of the guys from my class who combined their Euros to organise a joint birthday party.

We had a great time, and it was much needed after the building pressure at school. The picture is of us at Luca, Alessandro and Massimiliano's house before we went out.
It was not all play this weekend though, I spent 5 hours yesterday studying finance with Luca from my class. He understands the subject well, and in the end, I think I did too. I am planning to get some more practice in before tomorrow if I can.
Our major project at the moment is a strategic analysis of an industry and a company. Hakan from my working group selected the industries for us, and I am relatively happy to be working on the insurance sector - having worked for Eagle Star (now Zurich); New York Life Insurance and Ace Insurance, I know quite a bit about the industry and its challenges and opportunities - at least in Asia Pacific. My individual company to analyse is Generali, based here in Trieste, so it is a good chance to practice my Italian too as I read through the presentations of the company to find out what they are doing. We are supposed to make recommendations about future direction and business opportunities - it is a bit like Free Of Charge consultancy I guess, but if the recommendations are good enough we might be able to do something with it to earn some cash! I am trying to cultivate links at Generali, just in case....

Studiamo Insieme

We have formed a study group for strategy. It has a limited but varied number of participants, but has been great as we ploughed through 200 odd slides and about 400 pages of a book. It's interesting stuff, but pretty dry and easier if you can add examples, Or just some fun chat in between matrixes.
Tonight will be the third night in a row that we have met. The exam is tomorrow. Let's hope it makes a difference to the result.

Excuse me, but I can't get through

At least this is how I imagine the dialogue went this morning when my busdriver left the bus (motor running) in the middle of a junction to grab the attention of the policeman who was controlling the traffic near the turning in Piazza Goldoni.
Whatever he said it worked.
The policeman in question left his post.
And came to clear a path for the bus.
I hope to get the same driver tomorrow morning! or the same policeman...

Social Sarnano

One of my friends on the course asked what I did in Sarnano – didn’t I get bored in a place as sleepy as Le Marche?

The answer this week is certainly no! It’s been a whirlwind few days and I have barely managed to fit in everything that I had planned – let alone time to be bored. I have eaten 2 delicious meals, one at Simonetta and Fabiano’s house where I tested out my newly improved Italian on them and their friends, and the other at Chris and Irene’s where we sampled Irene’s rendering of the local bacala.

On the menu at Simonetta’s house was carbonara pasta. Its one of those dishes that sounds easy, and I suspect is horribly difficult! For secondo we had cold meats and bread – thin slices of proscuitto crudo, 2 types of salami and

The two highlights of the trip home were a trip to the shoe mecca of Cassetta D’Ete – home of the Tods factory – where I treated myself to my annual to-me-from-me present of some boots for the winter. Not at the Tods factory – now that I am no longer working Euros 200 for a pair of boots – even if this is heavily discounted from the normal retail price – seems exorbitant! But I got a good bargain and like all addicted shoppers, am wearing my new purchase whilst typing this on the train!

The other highlight was the Diamanti a Tavola (Diamonds on the Table) festival in Amandola. All the small towns in the region have these autumn tastes festivals and the Amadola one didn’t disappoint with truffles – both white and black – local wine and cheese and mountains of salami and local ham. The festivals are always done well – and it is jolly to see all the locals strolling around and shopping.

The rude awakening this week was the onset of winter. It was 19 degrees when I left Trieste – no complaints – but I noticed on arrival in Marche that it was appreciably colder. That night there was a hard frost and by Thursday the temperature had fallen to zero in the day too. Then the snow started on the mountains and today as I left the wind was so strong I was worried about the olive tree in my garden. Especially as one of Augustino’s flower pots took off from the roof above me and smashed on the ground – I was delighted that I was not in the garden at the time!

Its also been a bit of a mad scramble as it appears as if the internal staircase that I have been waiting years for is going to be started this week. I am not entirely sure that I know how the finished article will look, and I am working on suspending my disbelief that the stairs will actually ever happen – it has been so long coming that I am not entirely convinced! But nevertheless, I have once again cleared out the downstairs room in the flat, and covered the furniture. So we’ll see.

Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if this time there was progress on the stairs. And there is a litany of reasons:-
1. Its winter and the builders want inside work
2. Now that all my things have arrived from Hong Kong this is the time of maximum inconvenience for me
3. I have friends coming for Christmas – so predict unfinished work and HUGE amounts of mess
4. The price has gone up so much on this work that its now worth their while getting out of bed to do it!

I have attached a picture of the lounge before the whole in the roof, so I can remember what it used to be like in case anything goes wrong.