loveSicily meets the world
...or rather loveSicily meets about 50 people in London. Wednesday the 26th of November was our first official outing in London as a tour operator selling tailor-made holidays, cooking and mosaic courses in the South-East of Sicily. The occasion was a small christmas marketplace for a big building near Victoria station with lots of companies working in it. The people in the offices would hop over to the "marketplace" in the tea breaks to see what was on offer and have a chat with the people presenting.
Now, we have both stood by a table and board with people moving around to come and talk to us. The problem is the board had titles like "Temporary Protection Status - What Consequence for Kosovar Refugees in Italy" (for Katia) or "Identifying opportunities and constraints for goal achievement through relationship analysis" (for Ronald). This time our board was saying "Unique Journeys through Sicilian culture" and "Sicilian Cookery Holidays". What a shift!
Still the basic principles were much the same. A person walks by, we smile, they pause and have a look at the board. If interested they ask a few questions - we answer. In the past the questions would be something along the lines of "What related research is there to support you claims?" or "Have you looked at a paper by Munroe et al that was presented last year?". Now the questions were "Do they eat lots of pasta in Sicily?" and "My daughter visited some years ago...she said it was beautiful but hard to find a hotel!".
What you absolutely don't get to do in academic conferences is lure people over with free food - but we could do that for loveSicily. We had chocolate from Modica, almond sweets, and cheese from Ragusa. We were going to have sausages as well but we forgot to bring them along. We are willing to accept that it was probably some inner wish to keep them for ourselves that caused this slip-up...
People generally liked all the tasters. The chocolate was the one with chilli which gives an interesting kick after a few seconds and it was so enjoyable to watch their faces as they chewed and 5 seconds later a smile would come across the face and a nodding head.. as if to say "oh.. now I see, excellent!".
Our brochures were a big hit - everyone said that they were original. Well, as they say "need is the mother of all inventions". Not having huge budgets to spend on flashy brochures and also not believing in all that paper being wasted we printed some 4"x6" photos with all the relevant information on them and wrapped them in brown paper tied with a string. Pile them up and put chocolates in the middle and there you go!
It was tiring, it was a lot of fun and it was a great way to get people to talk about Sicily. In part it shows that while people know Italy in general they really don't know much about Sicily - so we have to get out there and make our point more often. And next time we will remember to bring the sausages too!