Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Day 1 - additional memories

There were once upon a time a group of young people from nine countries…all gathered in Vidrike, somewhere in a middle of a very beautiful nowhere. I shall skip the arrival day because someone else will tell you more about this.
…and I shall go straight to….number one :-)
We started the day with…guess…? Energizers! And name games. The one in the previous evening seemed that it wasn't enough. So now we were energized.
Then, Heleri and Ignas introduced us in the project, namely the program in general, the outcome (the activity we are going to have on the 30th of January).
Of course we had some questions about this last activity. That were answered :-)
Afterwards...let's see what we are expecting from this training, what is the motivation the brought us here and what obstacles we think we have.
And there were many ideas but more or less, we all had the same expectations and motivations. But we might be afraid of different things ( Stipe would like not to miss the plane :P ). But what if so? Estonia is nice, I would not mind that much if I missed the flight:-) But all these fears will vanish and expectations met. Actually they will move little by little to another wall, as we are accomplishing them.
After the lunch we had the most expected activity f the days: trip to Otepaaaaa!!! But not for skiing, for interviewing people on the street on subjects such as stereotypes in Estonia and not only, get in touch with locals, some facts about Otepaa. And others. I was in group with Ieva ( Latvia), Serhan (Turkey) and Ada from Croatia. Personally, I was curious what Estonian people think about stereotypes about them. Considering that we knew that it is said they are slow and cold people, I was wondering if they know as well. But actually, most of them did not mention these. Only one lady said it and she argued that ok we might be slow but Finish people are even slower :-) . She also agreed that they might be cold people but she explained it: they just do not let others enter in their lives that easily and the prefer to get to know a person better before letting him / her be part of his / her life. Which makes perfect sense, in fact ( maybe not for a “sangre caliente” person from Spain or Italy :-) )
We had a picture with the vice mayor of Otepaa ( I have never personally met the mayor or vice mayor of my city – Bucharest) so I can say that it was nice! And everything seem to be just perfect here…no discrimination, no difference in right of woman and men, no problem with gay marriages…is that so? We went into more details when coming back in Vidriku and had a debriefing on our findings.
In the evening it was really cool (and hot at the same time). We went to sauna and jumping in the snow, which for many of us was for the first time (jumping in the snow after the sauna). Actually I start to like this habit :-)
Aahhh I did not mention about the games that are ongoing during the game: we have secret friends and we are killers. Kissing killers  now I am going to write a secret love letter to my secret friend and let it in the secret box .

Adriana (Romania)

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