Second day here

Yesterday was the second day for us being here. We were already familiar with each other, we were comfortable making jokes and some of us were already tying friendships with people from the other groups. We had the chance to get some rest from the very long road to here. We took a 4 hour ride from Warsaw to get to our current acomodation place. The day started like every other day would. We had breakfast and made some small talk at the table. After the breakfast and some teambuilding activities, the coordinator presented the structure of an Erasmus+ YE project, how it is written, how and from where we get the financial support and how we spend the money. The idea of the project was introduced to us through a very interesting and interactive game. We placed on the floor the capitals of our countries, trying to make a map. Then, each of us had to stay in the place according to the places where we were born, where our parents and grandparents were born, finding many interesting things about each other. Some of us have different roots, and many of our family members went through conflicts, especially during the world wars. We also discovered that many of us didn’t know a lot about our great grandparents, and we noticed that the history of our families are getting blurry after 2 generations, so that’s why it is important to preserve history as an important part of who we are.

After, we had a workshop about the people we are going to interview, and we learnt how to take the interviews, taking into consideration that the subject is very sensitive. The workshop that followed was about the LARP – Live Action Role Play, a game that we will have today. After explaining the rules and sharing our previous experiences, dinner followed, and then many of us had fun cooking our own traditional dishes and preparing ourselves for the Intercultural Evening. We, the Romanian team, cooked a traditional dessert, called Papanasi. It was a tremendous and joyful part of the day, because we almost never cook at home, so here you have, 6 Romanians fighting over ingredients, bowls, giving commands but being way too afraid touching the flour, while having to deal with Hungarian sabotage. However, the cookies were very nice and everyone fought over them in the Conference Room, where we held the event. Our colleagues from Cyprus prepared halloumi soup and everybody else brought something, traditional foods and drinks. We discovered many new things about other countries and how each one of us have different or similar culinary influences, depending on our geographical position. Also, we were very amazed to see that some Polish people know Romanian dances better than we do, and overall we observed during the intercultural evening the wonderful bounds that tie us together.

We look forward to the rest of the project, with much anxious and very happiness.