Now that we have less than a month left in Berlin, it is starting to set in that I want to make the most of my time here. There are definitely times where I would be okay with being back home, but I try not to think about it cause I know that right when I get back home I will wish I was still abroad. Nonetheless the work week passed by quickly as everyone at work was very productive this week and we all got a lot of tasks done. On Friday, I was invited by my company to attend an Online Marketing after show party which was a great experience. I got to network with a lot of people in the marketing industry in Germany and spent time out of the workplace with my coworkers. It was interesting to see people interacting with each other while representing their company, but also having a good time with everyone. This got me thinking about the industry and analyzing it a bit. The company I’m interning at, Gramercy Global Media, works solely with online marketing. The major competitors that they have are obviously the other online marketing agencies around Germany and worldwide. Yet, with this being said they have a strong group of clients that keeps the company profitable and then have plenty of secondary clients that contact Gramercy Global Media every once in a while. A major task that I have been given is actually to go through a couple thousand of contacts and figure out which clients we can contact again to rekindle things in hopes to increase our business development and client base. There are industries that struggle with sales so they contact Gramercy Global Media to try and raise their exposure and sales. Also there aren’t many challenges that the company faces with external issues, but within the company there are some issues. As a start up company that has only existed for seven years, they do not have enough full time employees to expand to more clients. Also since there are only fourteen people that work for the company between four different branches and seven of those workers are interns, there is definitely a sense of instability.

Now onto the weekend which I spent in a place I’ve wanted to visit my whole life…. Italy. Trying to figure out a good weekend to visit, I ended up deciding that this one would be a good time. With my family being from Albania, my mom actually has a friend that was her college roommate that lives in Italy and was able to set me up with her family to stay in Verona. First I flew into Venice and got to see an unbelievable city. Everyone I looked I saw water and beautiful bridges. Everywhere we went we traveled by boat and I was pretty surprised with how big of a tourist venue it was. My moms friend only knew how to speak Italian and Albanian so I was communicating all weekend in Albanian, but there were instances where people in Venice only spoke English and I had to be the one translating. After a busy day in Venice, we then went to their home in Verona. Verona was much more relaxing and the weather was perfect. We got to see the house that Romeo and Juliet lived in along with other cool places downtown that had the classic Italian feel. The food was also fantastic and the people were so nice and helpful. Life just seems so simple and people love to help each other out no matter if they’re family or a random stranger. This was arguably the best weekend I’ve had so far abroad and it was nice to be in a setting that was separate from all the tourism. I could go on and on about this trip, but I’ll leave it at that and hopefully this week I will plan a trip to Amsterdam with a couple of friends and potentially set up a trip to Bremen, Germany to visit one of my friends from high school that is spending a full year in Germany!