Untill we meet again?

So, all good things come to an end.. Today will be our final blog for the IMCD Summerschool, but before we say our goodbyes, we want to fill you in with what we have been up to yesterday and today. Besides a lecture on sustainability in tourism from the Estonian tutors and students we have been working our asses of to finish our marketing plan in time for the final presentation which will be tomorrow.


Some of us had the pleasure of enjoying an amazing meal of Calamari’s with our Slovenian tour guide/ student Dino in Koper, which made them put a huge smile on their face ( so if you ever have the chance, definitely go and have dinner at Pizzerija Atrij in Koper :). The rest of us enjoyed a nice picnic on the seaside, and because of the birthday of our Dutch tutor Steffen. There was plenty of wine, which also put smiles on our faces!


When arriving in Portoroz nearly two weeks ago, we could never have thought that it would come to an end so soon.. We have experienced that what they say is actually true; Time flies when you’re having fun. Although the schedules where filled there was plenty of leisure time, and of course we made good use of it. Apart from that a lot of social connections where made, and it can be said that it might just hurt a bit when we have to say goodbye to everything tomorrow evening. And instead of saying goodbye we would like to say: until we meet again. Summer school has been a nice experience to learn about different countries and its beautiful locations and cultures, so it is sure to be said some arrangements will be made to come and visit each other’s countries.
So below we will provide with some images that will definitely be put on our human hard drive :)

Now the Dutchies would like to thank the organisation for this great experience. Moreover thanks to all the nice people we met and became friends with, during this short period of time. Untill we meet again!

From sLOVEnija with fairytales

 

This video is inspired by the movie "Under the Tuscan Sun"

“Once upon a time students from different countries came to Slovenia, to Portoroz. They gathered to participate in IMCD summer school, to get knowledge about innovative marketing, about other cultures and to find some new ideas for marketing. They couldn’t imagine how amazing it would be to have challenges and be innovative in everyday life. One day they as usually went to university to have lectures. The new challenge was waiting for them - the storytelling and opportunity to tell own story of an old salt storage houses. As we all know picture tells more than hundred words, so students had a chance to come up with a new story by taking pictures. And they let their mind to fly, they all told different stories about love, hard work and secret parties… and all got cast away, so this is the charm of storytelling. Everyone has his own story to tell, each destination has it’s own unique story…..”

Today we certainly have a story to tell you… We fell in love with Piran… So we come back here every now and then. Maybe it reminds us also a little bit of home, because of red roofs in the old town. We have lots of red roofs in the old town of Tallinn and if we climb up to the platform we can see hundreds of them by the sea. It is like a piece of home with better weather conditions. As we say, Estonian summer is like three months of bad skiing weather. Ok. It is not so bad and we actually enjoy our four seasons every now and then. But still ... There is something special and magical about Piran, it feels like time stops here… People live their simple lives even in the main square, you can see boys playing football, elderly men enjoying the beauty of playing chess and housewives hanging laundry to the balcony. It seems like people here really know how to enjoy their lives. And so do we in Piran!

Celebrate good times come on.

Hello!

Today Naja Petek who works in tourist agency has a lecture about promotion. We remembered video about Egypt which was made to attract Slovenians to that destination. The idea that Egyptians speaks slovenian is really innovative.

Today is also Steffen's birthday. So before we started we sing him a birthday song and give him little gifts. We hope he will have a nice celebration here in Portorož and we wish him all the best.

After that we had workshop were we had to tell story with pictures. In Portorož there are two warehouses that are not in use anymore. They used to secretly keep salt there. With pictures we had to tell a story how would we make them useful. After that we had again an amazing lunch at Faik's restaurant.

At 3 p.m. were again lectures by Heli Tooman. She was like yesterday very good, she was talking about wellness tourism, we also had a chance to write about wellness dimensions, how to assess and follow the holistic principle of wellness on developing and marketing of the wellnes destination. And we had so much fun, because Marit and Sander had some presentation about their hometown Parnu in Estonia. The presentation was really good and they had a sense of humour.

AAAAAnd theeen ;D and then when the night falls we will go out on the beach to hang out a little. And then Coco.

 I don't care.

Once upon a time...

Today our day could actually begin this way. After a midnight swim and a night of restful sleep, nothing better to wake up our minds than a very interesting and challenging workshop: storytelling! First we were introduced to some techniques of good story telling in the marketing industry. And then, because there´s no better way to learn, we create our own stories to tell others. The challenge was quiet interesting: to figure out how to use those abandoned warehouses nearby Turistika. And we came up with four great ideas! Definitely we should meet the real mayor of Piran!

In the morning we also had time to congratulate the lecturer from the Netherlands Steffen. It´s really a nice place and company to celebrate his birthday!

After a pasta lunch we returned to Turistika to learn more about Welness. Again with Heli Tooman, one of the Estonian lecturers, we did some exercises to practice all the theoretical information we were given. In between we had a presentation from our colleagues from Estonia that gave us some information about how to market Parnu as a wellness destination. It was really interesting. Then we had some more group exercises, namely to come up with a slogan for a coastal destination. Once again great ideas (we really need to be introduced to the mayor!)

As long as some of us needed to work in the Marketing Plan, we finished classes a little bit earlier than usual. But some of us could also find some time to go for an afternoon swim. It´s really great that the beach (ok, the sea) is literally across the street! We will miss it, and much more!

Now is time for having dinner: after more than a week having sandwiches, balcony and beach picnics we are really willing to have some “real” dinner, seated in a table, with fork and knife (for Susana and Maria is a spoon please, because they desperately want to eat a vegetable soup).

And that´s it for today, tomorrow we will let you know about Steffen´s birthday party at Coco!

Beijos

IMCD 2013 - Blog survey

Hello!

We have completed our first survey of the workshop 1: The Blog and here are the results of our first survey.

The question was: What is the biggest benefit of Summer School?

We had 10 answers and the most popular answers were:

1. Social network - 8 replies
2. Knowledge - 1 reply
3. Paid vacations - 1 reply

Meanwhile, prepare your last posts and stay innovative.

Blog manager
Sander Kalda

A little bit of everything

We will start our blog today with the short flashback on the yesterday evening.  We repeated the open-air dinner at the beach with a lot of food, some wine and beer. Considering that we get to know every day more and more so the evenings become more interesting.  We are already aware that this are our last night’s spent together so we already make plans for visiting each other.

 

 

 

 

Slowly we are also coming to the end of our lectures which were today really diverse. First we had a lovely and interactive presentation about the Story telling in Marketing. As a part of that we got a task to think about the story of two abandoned buildings in Portorož , which are actually a part of the cultural heritage because in the past they served as salt storehouses. Since today they no longer serve for this purpose and do not fit in the image of Portorož as a tourist destination, divided in groups we have developed ideas that could help revive the old buildings. There were some really innovative ideas and it would be really interesting if some of these ideas would really come true.

 

 

Today we also „witnessed“the birthday celebration of one of our lecturers so we prepared a small surprise for him and gave him a funny gift so he can remember this day.

 

 

After the lunch in the News café we continued with the lectures. It was time for Wellness and Estonia. Our friends from Estonia introduced us to the theme of developing the wellness tourism in the city Pärnu which is located in southwestern Estonia. Then we tackled the topic of wellness in general and we found out what is really behind the words wellness dimension.

 

 

We will finish our day by working further on our marketing plan fr the final presentation on Thursday. We are all excited to see what the other groups have developed and how they made their marketing plans.

And when the sun goes down it's beach time and maybe a trip to Coco bar in Portorož.

Greetings from

 

S, I, K & J

 

Happy Birthday Steffen, a story that will be told...

Before we will tell you about today, we will go back to yesterday. With the Estonians, and this time also with the Portuguese and some Croatians we had a Beach Picnic again.

This was a really great time, including lots of food and midnight swimming. People really enjoyed themselves, some more than the other, if you know what I mean ;)

All in all we came to the conclusion that one really needs beach picnics. If you haven’t done it yet, you should definitely go for it! 

Now coming to today, we had a Story Telling workshop. This did not only include a lecture and theory about this topic. No, no! To show what we learned we told some stories in the end of this workshop and discovered that being in love can be dangerous (be careful not to end up locked somewhere), or an opportunity - and not to forget: Did you know that we have mermaids in Portorož?

Besides this we also learned a lot about different promotional videos and how to assess them. After watching a few, you could really see the differences!

 

And since we are talking about storytelling we have another nice story for you. Well, to be honest I believe the main character wanted it to be a more secret story but we do not really care. It is the birthday of our lecturer Steffen today! Congratulations!

Tonight we will celebrate this with a nice beach picnic again, and afterwards go to the inner city of Portorož and celebrate this special day. As you can see here, Steffen dressed up for this day ;)

 

Right now we are having a lunch break. Nevertheless we definitely can not wait until it ends. You might wonder now, why that? Well, that’s easy. Our Estonian friends had to prepare a lecture for this afternoon and we can not wait to see it. Expectations are high, guys!

We are now going for a swim. We will tell you everything about the rest of this today tomorrow. Tot morgen!