Zaragoza

In August I moved from Madrid to a town called Zaragoza, halfway between Madrid and Barcelona to complete the second half of a dual degree program between Instituto de Empresa's (IE) International MBA school in Madrid and Massachusettes Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston's international masters degree in Logistics Engineering and Supply Chain Management. Yeah - kindof a long, complicated mix of schools, cities and countries to form a dual masters degree...when we began the program here at Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC), we asked the director the most simple way of explaining what we're doing in Zaragoza and he told us there is no simple explanation - the full version is about all that can be told. So the history goes...

Zaragoza has long been an important logistics hub in Southwest Europe with its equidistant location, 3 hours, from the important Spanish ports of Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and San Sebastian as well as only 3 hours from the captal, Madrd, and 3 hours from the Spanish / French border in the Pyranees Mountains. When searching for a location for a logistics hub in Spain, the government of Aragón which is the 'state' of Zaragoza, headed a project called PLAZA, the largest logistics premises on the European continent of nearly 3,200 acres. When MIT was searching the European continent for an international base for their Logistics Engineering and Supply Chain Management program, they liked what they saw in the PLAZA project and worked with the government of Aragón and the Zaragoza Logistics Center to form the MIT-Zaragoza Masters in Engineering and Supply Chain Management program. Instituto de Empresa then linked with the two schools to form the dual degree program, hence here I am.

We are 26 students from 16 countries ranging in age from 22 to 55. The professors also form an international group from the US, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, India and others, with Phd's from institutions such as Harvard, Princeton and MIT. In other words I feel a little undereducated at times.

Zaragoza is a nice city - small in general (800,000 inhabitants) but will probably double in size by 2020. What used to be known as the 'worlds fair', now the International Expo, will be held here during the summer of 2008...the local government has spent an excess of 5 Billion Euros (US$7 Billion) on the project which will bring an estimated 1 million visitors to the city. Below are a few photos of my life so far in Zaragoza...

Relaxing at Plaza Pilar

Parque Grande

Plaza Pilar - Zaragoza's Main Plaza

View of the cathedral and Rio Ebro from the top of the cathedral

GOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLL!!!! several of us are sharing season tickets to Zaragoza's soccer games...again I picked the wrong profession.

Orientation week in the Pyrenees (in the photo I'm in the front left)

Orientation week - hiking in the Pyrenees Mountains (the guy from Rhode Island and the girl from Venezuela)

My class - most of them anyway

Birthday dinner

Friends from IE came to Zaragoza for the weekend festival