Welcome to my blog, everybody and myself!
I guess I will start with a little introduction about myself...I'm Alessandra, also known as Ale, Alle, Delfo, Cicci, Ciccina, and other nicknames in Italy; Alex in France, Caribbeans and USA (of course pronounced differently!), Cicciolina in Montenegro and Peru (uh, really long story for that one:)
I was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy; lived in Parma, Italy for 17 years, moved to Sturgeon, MO for about 10 month and then to Columbia, MO for almost 2 years now. I love travelling, is the best thing I can do, the thing I do the best and that I love the most! Put me on a plane, send me somewhere ELSE (that's the key, somewhere NEW!) and you'll see me smile! I've been in France a lot, Greece and Sardina for summers as a kid, Carriacou, W.I. for the summers when I was a little older, been to Quebec and Turkey on trips with my family...I've been around the States a lot, made a lot of friends, and visited some of them back in Europe...I was in Montenegro last summer to visit my best friend, and in Madrid during the past new year's eve (noche vieja!).
As you can see, I love jumping from one place to the other, create bonds with people, and mostly LEARN from diversity!

Right now I'm a Marketing student at the University of Missouri - Columbia. I love it here! I try to be very involved in the university and take as much as I can from this experience. College in the States is amazing! (really expensive but amazing:) You really get to meet the world, cause you'll find people from different places, backgrounds, preconseptions, skin color, sex, religion...you'll find them all in this melting pot of the world, and that's the real potential of America (if it knows how to use it!)

As I said I try to be very involved in the university...I'm the Events Coordinator for AIESEC Missouri (http://aiesec.missouri.edu) and I just got back from an event that we cosponsored with the Muslim Students Organization. It was a speaker from Toronto, Canada. Her name is Maliha Chishti and she talked about the role of women in Islam. It was a very interesting lecture! She's very active with the feminist movement, and she's an active muslim as well. Her prospective is that the feminist movement in the islamic world cannot be made by idealist white women who go to the middle east and try to impose a model that doesn't fit with the culture, but has to come from islamic women themselves, who need to find their freedom and their rights in what they believe (the Quran) and she went into dept with this explanation. Wow, it blew me away! How interesting!
She also talked about other interesting theories, one of them being blaming colonization for the role that women have now in the Islamic world. Basically, whenever European countries colonized Islamic countries, they put muslim men out of their political power. Those men then were going back home and were exerting their power on their wives and children. I found that really interesting...never heard of it before!
And one more thing that she talked about that impacted me (she talked about a lot a lot of different things! she's a really knowledgeable woman!) was that right now nationalist political parties in Europe use Islam as the anti-liberal, anti-democratic force that they need to be defended from, and she just said "look at European history, Islam was there whenever all of that took place!" And that is really true, and it's something that everybody should be reminded of. It's not only white European males who made history, art, progress...it's diversity and interaction with different cultures, exchanges, movevent...

And I'll leave my first post with those thoughts.
Buona notte:)