Nando!

It has been a busy week with all the travel and touring different companies for our class...sorry for the lack of posting...but get ready because we are catching up!!! We apologize in advance but we don't have that exciting a day to tell you about for May 17...honestly the highlight was our lunch (as it mostly is with us)...it was outdoors and wonderful and yes, Italian food. The weather was beautiful and the company was fantastic! We've had a wonderful time getting to know all the students outside our cohort. For those of you who don't know, we are on a study abroad trip with the University of Texas at Arlington. We are both getting our MBAs. The focus of this class is sustainability. We've been learning some interesting tactics of how different companies around the world handle corporate social responsibility. It seems as if while all companies have their own culture but we all face common economic, environmental and social issues. We got up on Thursday and had 2 company visits planned - first we went to the Santander "compound" - Santander is the largest bank in Spain and the #1 bank in the Euro zone. Their facility was amazing - they literally kept calling it "the city". A little cult-ish but that's ok.  It had everything - restaurants, dry cleaners, dentist, hospital, day care, gym, tennis/basketball/volleyball courts, 1000+ year-old olive trees and even their own art gallery, which was very impressive! Second visit was to Telefonica. This company also had a beautiful cluster of buildings and amenities for its employees and even it's own metro stop due to lack of parking!  On May 18, we started the day with a company visit to Acciona, which is a successful construction company. A while ago they invested in renewable energy, wind specifically, which would help them with a longer term profit.  The executive director of sustainability made a few good points (we listed below) about sustainability being such a big part of their business model... There is no life ahead for business as usual. Need to get buy-in from organization for change. Must say "things" publicly so you'll follow through. After our company visit, we headed towards Toledo - another beautiful ancient walled city. Our tour guide, Fernando, was the hit of the visit - we were told to call him "Nando", which we all gladly obliged. In fact, our fellow cohort-er, Marcus, has since done frequent imitations just to help us relive the memories...he'll probably be thankful to not be constantly asked  by all of us to do the imitation so we can laugh..."and to be...closer to.........God!" (inside joke) That night we got a little flare of culture...we had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant weirdly named Puerto Rico (Rick Steve's recommendation). We went to see a show of Flamenco dancers. It was amazing...those dancers were so serious about their jobs (their faces were serious) but so wonderful! We were all intrigued - even the boys loved it - we know this because they all were trying to imitate the male dancer (minus the tight pants and panty line)!! The guitarist and singers (just acoustic music) were awesome...also when one was dancing and the others were sitting out, they clapped to help the one dancing keep the beat making percussion sounds with their hands...literally handmade maracas. Impressive!