This little lady was an unexpected discovery. In Italian she is a member of the “puffi” which means Smurfs. I call her Jane Fonda Smurfette. In actual fact she isn’t as rare as the version of her with pink leg-warmers…anyway…I discovered her and a pile of other vintage puffi at the Thursday morning market on Piazza Duomo. I bought some for my Hunny who is a casual collector but I had to return with a pdf of images and specifications of several puffi missing from one of his colleagues’ collection. I did well bringing home this little lady and seven others from a rare McDonalds collection – Milan for toy collecting, who knew!
This is the first weekend I’ve stayed put in Milan since I arrived. I had to get my head down and do some reading for a mid-term in Diversity Management and Policy that I have coming up in a week and to put some group assignment time into my Consumer Neuroscience. A note for anyone wanting to study overseas – group work has the same eye-rolling trials and tribulations no matter where you are in the world. I did however decide to leave the reins to someone else, which is good practice for me, and of course my two German classmates were only too happy to battle it out for leader of the group. We have been assigned the brand Eataly for this project which is a gorgeous store slash restaurant concept that stocks everything authentically Italian, sourced from a network of treasured local farmers and suppliers. It’s quite a spectacular visit and greatly inspiring for a consumer neuroscience project.
I also pulled on my gym clothes and took myself off to one of those modern European ‘everyone does it’ activities – the outdoor gym. My Danish friend had already run 10kms by the time I power-walked onto the scene engrossed in a podcast (Stuff you should know – great bite sized info packages about interesting things of all kinds). I did a pile of ballet exercises that my trainer Daniella would be proud of (and which I have videos of myself doing on my phone which she filmed with intensity before I left Jozi. Just in case I forgot to keep in shape and necessitated a serious one-on-one boot-camp on my return).
I also have to say that Milan is second only to Tokyo when it comes to sushi. Delicious all you can eat of every possible kind of sushi including dumplings and Kirin beer. I loaded up nicely on my Omega 3’s! Meanwhile, I caught up with Twin who arrives for a visit next week and Poocs who wants to go to Como and the Amalfi coast when she is here at the end of April so we are researching that – go skype/facetime/WhatsApp/google for all the planning and communicating that’s possible no matter where anyone is! If you don’t know the fabulous humans that are Twin and Poocs you can read all about them here.