A tribute to true friends

We’ve heard the expression many times: true friends. What are true friends? Can we even use the words in times like these, in a world like ours where the impersonal and anonymous are the order of the day and people more often than not reduce themselves to the surface given that digging beneath it is too big of an effort and showing feelings is considered embarrassing and nonprofessional?

I can assure you, you, too, have true friends, you might not even be aware of it, but you do. Just look back and ask yourself: Who are the people who supported you, who were there for you when you least expected and most needed it, who reached out to you when you pulled back, who forgave you your big and small mistakes, who loved you without expectations, without questions or demands? It might be your parents, your childhood or school friends but it might even be someone unconventional like a neighbor, a total stranger, a brief acquaintance…whoever comforted and consoled you, helped you out of misery, made you smile and forget your worries and just listened unselfishly when you needed to get something off your chest. Just ask yourself when you experienced true, unconditional love and you’ll know your true friends.

So, my dear friends, thank you for being there! You’re in my heart, now and forever!

Your Gergina

Rihanna feat. Jay-Z: Umbrella (Good Girl Gone Bad)

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This is Chile

Did you know that Chile has the driest desert in the world, glaciers, big forests, numerous rivers, fertile valleys, 50 active volcanoes and 3 different climate zones leading to national hazards, earthquakes like the recent one and tsunamis? Well, we didn’t either, until we started researching for and working on our final paper for the Michael E. Porter MBA class of Robert Kennedy College on Corporate Strategy and Competitiveness where we had decided to write on Chile’s competitiveness and the Chilean wine industry as a project team of four, dispersed in four different countries: Hungary, Portugal, Qatar and Switzerland.

Located in Southern South America, South of Peru and West of Bolivia and Argentina, the Republic of Chile is about 2,880 miles long. It is bordered by the Pacific Ocean in the West and by the Andes mountains in the East. Chile occupies a land mass of 756,102 sq km, ranking 38th in the world in land mass. Chile’s population is estimated at 16,746,491, and has a growth rate of 0.856%.

As it turnes out, Chile is a fascinating country with huge development potential which has already performed remarkably well in many areas and contributed to Chile’s ranking 30th in the Global Competitiveness Index 2009-2010.

Our project paper which we’ve just handed in (today is July 5th, 2010), has been a group work from the start. Never have I experienced a group of four people so far apart working so harmonically and closely together as with you, dear Ildiko, Joana and Bernie, for which I would like to thank you from my deepest heart. It’s been my great pleasure and honour to work with such devoted, patient, enduring and generous people who I haven’t had met before April 21st, 2010. The great experience proves that we don’t need to be coming from the same countries, cultures and backgrounds in order to understand each other perfectly.

See the result of this beautiful work and read our paper here:
Chile and the Chilean Wine Industry

P.S. I wrote the executive summary and the chapters “Identification of Strategic Issues Facing Chile” as well as “Identification of Strategic Issues Facing the Chilean Wine Cluster”.

Salud!

Creed: Sacrifice (Greatest Hits)

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Life is like a…

Life is like a circus: There are all kinds of strange animals in the arena you have to keep under control while you’re walking on the tightrope without a safety net and all the spectators’ eyes are on you, watching every move closely, waiting for you to trip and fall down. There might be some rules to help you balancing your way out of this while juggling with all kinds of balls:

1. Choose the right challenge: There’s no sense fighting lost battles. Find a race you can win and do it!

2. Trust your intuition: This simply means that you should always listen to your gut feeling and to your heart in doubtful situations.

3. Don’t act in a mad rush: We don’t want you slipping off the edge!

4. Live in the moment: Life is happening here and now! You don’t want to drift off in memories or dreams of the future too much as you might just forget to enjoy the moment!

5. Find joy in little things: The world is a beautiful place. Open your eyes and see all the little things around you that you ignore every day because you’re too busy worrying, stressing or going over problems in your head. It might be a field with blooming dandelions, a smile rising in a child’s face, the magic of the fading day, the silver moon or a pink magnolia tree…You’ll know when you see it.

6. Awaken your passion: Put your passion in everything you do. You might find that things get much more enjoyable this way. There’s something positive to be found even in the most tedious tasks.

7. Give in to your inner child: You’re young, no matter how old you are. Don’t bother limiting yourself to certain things or making certain conclusions based on some societal stereotypes and cliches. Goof around, laugh out loud and do stupid things. You’ll find it liberating!

8. Do as you please: It’s your life! Don’t let others tell you what to do or how to behave unless you want it. Don’t try to live up to anyone’s expectations but your own!

9. Show your feelings: Don’t be as cold as ice because you’re not. Learn to show your feelings as there’s nothing more human, more likeable, disarming and appealing as a person true to her or his feelings. You might be surprised how this could change your life.

10. And last but not least: It’s all in your head! Your attitude is decisive in everything you do! The only person who can make you happy is yourself! You’ve got the power!

I believe in you! :-)

Your Gergina

The_Fray_-_The_Fray_-_10._Happiness

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Chilean wine cluster project: part 1

No writing of a project paper on Chile and its wine cluster without a Chilean wine tasting first! No sooner said than done. And of course, Chile has delicious wines, as we affirmed in Zurich’s Puls 5. It’ll be a fun paper to write from four different corners of the world, each of us writing a chapter and putting the whole thing together in the end. Salud!

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20 down, 5 still standing: RKC Microeconomics Residential


24 students, 1 professor, 1 topic: Michael E. Porter on Corporate Strategy and Competitiveness and 1 location: Technopark in Zurich. Students were coming from all over the place: Nigeria, US, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Morocco, Russia, UK, Egypt etc. The one-week-residential was supposed to take place from April 19 till 23, 2010, 24 students had signed in and confirmed. Then of course, the icelandic volcano struck! My fellow-students were stuck on international airports! Monday morning, the class was pretty modest: Ildiko from Hungary, the professor and me! Ildiko suffered a 12-hour-long train ride from Budapest in a sleeping wagon (third floor bed with the suitcase in her arms). Monday afternoom, Bernie from Qatar arrived totally worn out after a day long odysee from Doha to Rome by plane, then from Rome to Milan by train, switching trains in Milan and in Chiasso to make it to our class in Zurich in the afternoon. Meanwhile, the rest of students remained missing and angry considering their comments on the RKC website’s forum. Then Tuesday afternoon another survivor of the traffic crisis: Joana made it from Maputo in Mozambique by plane to Lisbon where she had to stay for 2 days before making it on another plane Tuesday morning to Zurich where she arrived in the late afternoon. And finally, there’s the professor coming from the UK: With his flight cancelled, he took the train and was in Zurich by Monday.

The world might be a village sometimes. But only with air traffic up and running. This experience clearly demonstrated the incredible power of nature and the powerlessness of us people to react to it.

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Dedicated to the kids of the 60s, 70s and 80s of the 20th century

If you were a kid back then, it would be difficult for you to believe while looking back that you actually survived to see today. We were driving cars without security belts, without airbags, our small kids’ beds were painted in the brightest imaginable colors containing a dangerous amount of lead. There were no child-proof locks on bottles of drugs, doors very often lacked locks and drawers didn’t lock at all. We were drinking water from street fonts and not from sterile mineral water bottles. No one would have ever thought of wearing a bike helmet. What a horror!

For hours, we were carving self-made toy cars out of boards and with tires found on some trash disposal site and not until driving down the hill with the self-made batman mobile, it suddenly occured to us that we forgot to build brakes. In the mornings, we were going out, playing all day long and coming home when the street lights were being turned on at night, if there were any at all. And during this entire time, no one knew where we were playing or what we were up to. There were no cell phones or iPhones, imagine that!

Several kids were sharing an ice cream and a soda and no one died. We didn’t have PCs, 3D games, CDs, cells, 160 channels on cable TV, Internet, iTunes and social media. We went to the movies in bunches, because video didn’t exist!

But we had friends. We were going out to see them. If we were needing someone, we went to their homes to see them, just like that, without calling first. Alone in this brutal world, without security. How did we even manage to survive?

We made up our own games, we ate cherries with the stone and no one had any digestion problems because of it. During breaks at school, we splashed water from multi-use injections and dish liquid bottles. Our actions were ours and ours only and we were ready to face the consequences. We suffered cuts, bruises and broke our bones, but no one sued the other. We held ourselves responsible. The idea of bribing the cops or trying to avoid military service didn’t exist. Our parents, relatives, friends and acquaintances from those times always stood on the side of the law.

Yeeeeaaah, this is how we were!

And this is what we’ve become:

1.  By mistake, you enter your pin code in the microwave control panel.

2.  You haven’t played Patience with real cards for years.

3. You can’t find your car in the parking lot, unless you call it by remote.

4.  Your grandma talks more about Esmeralda and Ridge than about her own kids.

5. You know more about Brad Pitt’s problems than about your brother’s.

6. You hear on the news that 50 people lost their lives in a bombing and you change the channel because it’s nothing new.

7. You take your shoes off before entering…the plane.

8. You have a list with 15 phone numbers to call your four-members-family.

9. Man’s best friend isn’t the dog anymore, it’s the iPhone.

10. You call yourself every morning in order to find your cell phone.

11. You’re pissed by the fact that you can’t do the same with the TV remote.

12. You don’t know anybody’s phone number by heart, not even your own, because they’re all in your cell.

13. You don’t call your friends anymore, because you see what they’re doing on facebook or twitter.

14. To leave your cell at home is a drama. The only thing more scary is to lose it!

15. Your kids play soccer every day…on the PS3.

16. Your 10-year-old nephew doesn’t talk much but he chats perfectly fine on Google Talk.

17. Your 10-year-old nephew writes faster on the keyboard than he’s able to speak.

18. You’re not up-to-date if you haven’t slept with your sex.

19. If you’re at a teen party, you can take a leak anywhere, just not in the restrooms; the restrooms are for sex only.

20. Most people born around 1999 have already had more sex than you had.

21. If you’re listening to songs with a sense then you’re either too old or gay.

22. You have a login for your file with logins.

23. You send e-mails to your colleague at work who is sitting…next to you.

24. Your reason for not keeping in touch with relatives and friends is that they don’t have e-mail.

25. You check your mails at least 10 times a day, but you don’t have the time for a chat with your mum more than once a week.

26. If there’s nothing in the mail for you for more than a week, you feel neglected, even if you usually get only advertising mail.

27. If you don’t get any e-mails for a day or two, you start missing spam.

28. You hate writing with a pen, because there’s no spelling check.

28. You complain that there’s no copy-paste on your cell, so you buy a cell with a copy-paste.

29. You buy a cool digital camera to take as many pictures as you like. Now, there are so many that you don’t have the time to look at them.

30. You call from your car while standing at the front door in order to check if there’s someone home to help you with the groceries.

31. You’re getting pissed at your friends’ not calling you when they’re five minutes late.

32. Your kids don’t want to eat food that hasn’t been on TV.

33. You get up in the morning and go online before coffee.

34. The more you plan your time, the less you have.

35. You paint smiley faces even when writing with a pen.

36. You incline your had sideways when you smile :-)

37. You smile while reading this text.

39. You actually want to say “blog” instead of  ”text”.

38. You know exactly to whom you’ll forward this blog.

40. So go ahead! Time’s money.

:-)

Your Gergina

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