Back to Columbia!
This week was spring break at Mizzou and I had planned to stay in Columbia, study a lot and start packing stuff to send back home...well, ;) on Thursday night my housemate Brodie asked me if I wanted to go camping in Texas with him and some other friends...I really wanted to go but I had signed up to hold a training session for AIESEC the following Monday night...
So on Friday morning I called the AIESEC office in NY, asked a guy if he could hold the training session for me, and at around 3 pm found out that I could leave for break! We left Columbia around 5, and I found out that we were actually gonna go camping in Florida! It was 7 of us, we drove Laura's parents minivan, we stayed in St. Andrew national park (5 minutes from Panama City) and it was amazing!!! The whole trip ended up costing around $150, which is super cheap! It was a little too windy on the first day, but then it got warm, and sunny, and the beach was GORGEOUS! The ocean in Florida reminds me on the Carribeans, the water is super transparent, the sand looks like white salt...it was really clean, not crowded at all (and for anyone who has been to beaches in Italy you know that that's a big deal!)...I had time to read a novel by Alessandro Baricco, an italian writer who I absolutely adore! He can "paint" images when he writes, sometimes I have to hold my breath when I'm reading his books for their beauty...
Anyways, I was laying in my swimming suit, on a white beach, I swam in a beautiful ocean, I was raeding a beautiful book, I had on the background the sound of waves and seagulls...that's my personal heaven! At night we would come back at the campsite, shower, grill, sit around the fire, drink a little bit, then go out! One night we went to the biggest club in the US (La Vela)...nothing too exciting, I have been to biggest clubs before;) And the last night we ended up at the creepiest bar I've ever been in! It was ladies night and we could drink everything we wanted for free, but the crowd at the bar was mostly creepy old men! We finally left and had wine on the beach, before coming back to our crowded tent (all 7 of us slept in the same tent!)

So that's me at 20 years old...I can decide to go on a trip to Florida in a couple of hours and just LEAVE!

So now I'm back in Columbia...the weather has been great, it gives me that feeling of holiday and it gets so hard to concentrate and study! So I haven't opened a school book yet;) But I have been cleaning the house and started a new book! It's called Partir which means Leaving in French...it's written by a Moroccan guy, and it's about people who want to leave Morocco dreaming Europe...the book has been nice so far, and mostly it has been easy! I feel so proud of myself to actually be able to read in French with no problems! I can't wait to be in Lyon next semester, it feels so nice to be confortable with a different language!
Right now I think I feel quite confortable speaking/reading/thinking in French, but I think it is mostly because I'm here and I'm not in contact with slangs, accent, everyday French! But next semester will be pretty challenging, and I miss challenge!

Right now I'm also applying for a pretty challenging and competitive internship in New York City for the summer...I will need to interview on the phone and I need to do some research on the company before hand to make sure I have questions and I understand all about the position, the product that I will be working with and the company itself...once again it will be a good challenge, and if I end up not getting the position, I have internship offers with AIESEC in Turkey, Germany and India!!!

It has been a pretty lame Friday night, but it's good to get some rest! I'm in the middle of a Senegalese movie about women circumcision, so I think I'll just finish to watch it and then get a good night of sleep!

Buona notte, sogni d'oro!

Today was a really nice day...I woke up, did loundry, went to school to work on a marketing project with some classmates, came back home, had a very nice italian lunch followed by some delicious real espresso coffee, and then played football (soccer) with some people...it was really fun! I hadn't played football for a long time and it's actually a really good anti-stress, and a good way to bond with people! Once again I was playing with THE WORLD: let me see if I can remember all the nationalities that were playing: USA, Venezuela, Peru, China, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Italy (of course:), Ghana, South Africa, and I'm pretty sure there was more. How awesome! So many people from such different places bonding together on a football field in Missouri playing with a ball! Just see it: take an atlas, make arrows leave from all those places and let them lend in Missouri, then zoom on Stankowski field and what do you see?! Around 20 people kicking a ball and running up and down a field...wow, I love seeing the consequences of what globalization is bringing to the world...so much interaction!

Then I came back home and got an email from this speaker from California who I invited to speak at Mizzou on Israel-Palestine-USA and what the media leave out. She wants $2000 plus airfare and hotel!!!! Isn't this crazy?!?! Wow, I realized that she was an important, very knowledgeable woman, but $2000?! Are there actually people who just live off going around university speaking about their topic, and getting payed an outregeous amount of money? I think it's insane...it's like giving a price to knowledge. Well, I guess that's what universities do, and why books have a price, and why there are such good university professors out there. But still, I couldn't believe she asked me for $2000...wow! I guess I need to look for a speaker on a smaller scale...it's frustrating!

In a week spring break will start at my university, and I'll be almost alone in Columbia, but I'm excited cause I'm trying to save money to go to Peru for Hector and Jessica's wedding...and I will be able to maybe meet Brian in Lima too! It will be amazing if I actually end up going (I still need to finalize my summer plans), I could really give anything up for exploring a new country, new people, a new culture with its colors, smells, tastes...

I'll end this post with those dreams...

me! 

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:)