Week 7

This week could not be any more tiring! It’s the first week back from our first travel break AND we all have a lot of tests and assignments due this week plus LEAP coaching to attend. Monday was really fun though because everyone was trading stories from their travels. It is so crazy to think that 126 of us split up for 10 days and covered almost all of Europe! Everyone’s stories were great and I especially liked hearing what other groups did in some of the same cities that I went to. Monday night we also had “Date with a Professor.” Basically our professors plan a “date” for a group of 30 students and we sign up for which professor’s date we want to go on. I went to pizza making with my marketing professor Joe George. He is the man! Joe George is hands down the best professor I have ever had, both here and at State. All of our professors are SUPER successful guys who have retired (with the exception of a few) and are now teaching in Italy for a semester because they can. The projects George has worked on in the past and the stories he tells us are hilarious. He is quite a character and he’s originally from Texas so he has quite the accent.

So 30 of us take a bus to Asolo to the pizzeria and when we walk in the door we all have a glass of vino waiting for us. Here’s the best part, the restaurant owner/chef does not speak English and none of us speak enough Italian to communicate with him (we forgot to get a translator). So we spend about an hour playing a game of charades with this guy trying to figure out what he is telling us in terms of ingredients, cook time and temperature etc. According to him from start to finish it should only take about 4 minutes to make a pizza so I don’t know what Gumby’s excuse is for my 30 minute wait…. The pizzas are cooked in a wood fire oven too which he manages to maintain at 800+ °F!! We each had the chance to make our own pizza but we didn’t learn how to toss the dough in the air (probably for the best). I put everything on mine and it was SO good. However, pepperoni and dried red pepper flakes in Italy are a good bit hotter than in the States. I could not finish my pizza because it was so hot and spicy. Luckily I wasn’t the only one who made a fool out of themselves because after dinner there was a line of us across the street getting some gelato to cool our taste buds. George recommended that we all go back to the pizzeria another night because there is a pizza called the Picasso that a previous CIMBA MBA student created that is basically a pizza with everything on it, folded in half, with more topping then added on top and then baked. YUM! 

After pizza making Monday night the rest of the week has been pretty much downhill. It snowed again so that wasn’t really fun anymore. Snow was cool the first week, not anymore.