Hello Everyone!

Last night I returned from my fall break! I had an amazing week and did a ton of different things! Since I have 10 days worth of stories I am going to try and post a blog for each city so that it isn't 1 monstrous entry.

To start I left on an early train Thursday to Torino. It was a 5 hour train and it went by pretty quickly which was nice (taking naps helped it go by quick!).On Thursday the only event for the food festival was the opening ceremonies. They were amazing! First let me start by explaining what the food festival was all about. There were 2 parts. The first called Terra Madre (mother earth) is an organization all about "good, clean, and fair" food. Basically the organization is working towards the idea that everyone has the ability to get food-that the price doesn't cause people to go hungry. Also that food is produced properly and that it is good! This part of the festival had opening and closing ceremonies and tons of meetings about different food issues each day. The second part of the festival was simply TONS of tents set up by people selling various foods. There were tons of samples and things you could buy.

So to get back to the opening ceremonies-about 8,000 people were there for Terra Madre and 1300 of those were youth. People were there from probably 50-100 countries. I had no idea this organization was so wide spread! There were people from Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, South Korea, Japan, the US, Canada, Norway and tons more. Many of the people dressed in their typical native clothing each day so it was very interesting see! The opening ceremonies consisted of music from a variety of different groups plus a bunch of speakers. One speaker was actually a sophomore from Massachusetts! He had started a garden at his high school so he came to tell the story. After the opening ceremonies all the youth got bused to Bardonecchia, a town 1.5 hours away from the location of the festival. The town was right next to the Alps and the hotel was gorgeous! Bardonecchia is the Olympic village from the winter Olympics a few years ago.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday were spent doing mostly whatever you wanted. The buses left the hotel at 8:15 each morning. At the festival you could go to any scheduled meetings that you wanted. They also had regional meetings for each country so I attended the US one. Every single meeting was translated into 8 languages (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, German and Russian)! They had headsets for everyone to use for the translation each day. In addition to all of the meetings you could walk around all of the tents set up. I had TONS of samples. I got to try a lot of cheese, sausage, proscuitto. bread, olive oil, wine, biscotti, etc. Everything you can imagine was there, it was great! Over the 3 days I definitely didn't see all the tents. The map for all the tents was about 4 feet long..I also bought a few cannoli which were delicious!

In addition to all of the samples all of the delegates (those 8,000 people) got free lunch. There was a large amount of food and a pretty big variety. Also breakfast and dinner were provided at the hotel where I stayed so free meals every day! On Sunday there were closing ceremonies at night which were similar to the opening ceremonies. Overall the festival was so much fun. The pictures can show everything better than I can put in words. There was so much food and so many different people there it was great. It was so much fun to meet people from other countries. One day in line for lunch I met someone from Egypt and ate with him. Another day I talked to a biologist from Benin (Africa). It was crazy to have the opportunity to meet all of those people and try so much great food!

Well that's it about the food festival! Check out the next blog to hear about Paris!