You should do it!

We are Marta and Montse and we are volunteers in Europe at Your Playground EVS. We are really happy of having this opportunity. It is being a great experience because we have worked with kids and it was so funny. Also, our responsibles had helped us a lot. Moreover, this allowed us to meet new people and learn more about different cultures.

Poland is in a great geographical situation and we could visit other countries as Hungary, Check Republic, Germany and Austria, and learn about their culture and gastronomy It was an incredible experience. Also we love Wroclaw because it is really beautiful and lively.

We recommend others to participate in projects like this.

PD. Polish lessons were really funny.

Wroclaw in my mind…

Wroclaw in my mind…

I’m going to tell you about my living in Wroclaw… in one week will complete two month I’ve been here. My first expression was- oh my god what a calm and beautiful city! After Tbilisi-my hometown it seems really quite, calm, you feel secure in the streets. In Georgia people don’t follow the street rules, they cross the red. Here everything is OK with that cars street rules are more obeyed by people than in other countries… like it\s in Wroclaw I feel really secure here. Maybe the reason is that it\s not capital city and there are not so many different people from different countries and culture and second reason is that here is perfectly developed the biking system so the amount of the cars is really small. Here cars move slowly people, don’t rush in the streets every building is dyed in faded pastel colors and this fits so much to the character of the city, even people in the streets wear clothes so simple style with pastel colors. As I mentioned they don’t like vulgar or hipster outfit… the style is standard but with good taste. A little shock was for me that couples love walking in the streets with holding their hands and this become for me a symbol of this city. I’ve never seen sooo many couples with holding hands in other countries, they look so romantic at that time…

Despite of everything is so calm and quite on weekends I saw that sometimes they can get mad and waste their energy. First two weeks I worked hard but finally came that weekend when I could go out. When I neared The market square- the center of the city I felt the noise the action and when I entered the place I saw whole city concentrated between the buildings of market square everyone was drunk hugging kissing each other laughing out loud the music was on everywhere every pub and bar was overcrowded people had fan. I wasn’t surprised that beer is the main thing for the event. But it was funny for me when I saw the big containers on the table with a tap, men were pouring beer by themselves from it and drinking so they didn’t wasted their precious time for ordering new glasses and bother a waiter. In market square is always positive aura that pleasure is have fun there or just walking under the sun. If you love beer, pubs, esthetic and beautiful places, river, bridges and colors this city is for you.

Besides that city has very good location for traveling. It is very close to Berlin, Prague, Vienna even you can visit Budapest. For example time you need from Wroclaw to Berlin is 3:30 hours by bus or car. I mostly used blablacar. You can be registered on that website: blablacar.com and find a driver who has the same direction as you, see the price what he is offering (in most cases it’s cheaper than a bus or a train), also read the references from other passengers who have already traveled with them to get sure that its safe, pack your backpack and get ready for your trip. From Wroclaw I visited Berlin, Prague and Vienna. In some of them I tried couchsurfing. This one is a website for surfers and hosts, there you can find each other and offer your flat for free or find hot and ask to get you in there flat. In that case you can check its safety with the references. Except the fact that it’s free I like it more than hotel because I met some good people with that type of traveling so I advise you the same if you are not a huge fan of comfort.

Wroclaw is a lovely, beautiful city with very good location so if you have a chance to live here don’t think a lot, it’s really worth!

First impression

                                                             

Already 2 weeks ago when me and Anka came here in Wroclaw from Georgia and now I want to sheare my emotions, expectations and first impression of summer school and Wroclaw.

Everything was start 24 of May when I open my mail and saw the message started with magical words “Dear future volunteers” I was extremely happy and could not believe that I was chosen as a volunteer for this amazing project, that time I was working for my Master Thesis and this project became my motivation to finish my Thesis quickly and begun preparing for Wroclaw, time flies and the day of our flight came soon.  

So we arrived in Wroclaw and before we started training’s week we have some excursion around the city center Dorota, Sebastian and Justina  were really kind to us that’s why we managed  to get new environment and new people without difficulties. The city is amazing I impressed on the first day, colors of buildings, beautiful views, a lot of places where you can just sit downs  and enjoy the weather and view, food also became my favorite thing in Wroclaw (Zurek, pierogi, zupapomidorowa just perfecto). On the other hand the most important part of everything was other volunteers,  at the first day of our meeting Sebastian told us that we are one group, now I realized that we are really one group, maybe in our countries we have different kinds of friends, different professions and job but here we have same job, same profession and we are equal, we have friendly atmosphere at home and we learn how to work together, for me each of them is special and I have already love Anka, Marta and  Montse, I will them when we return in our countries and as Montse says “enjoy the moment don’t worry about the futue” so I’m trying to enjoy the every moment here.

First week of training, when we were preparing our summer schools agenda was difficult but interesting for me,  working with experienced people and share their knowledge is amazing experience and I tried to catch every important advises and it gave me huge motivation for our future activities.  We were working during the whole week and finally on the weekends we have had the agenda. 

So firs day came and we went to Ecocenter, I was nervous a bit,about ourselves how we managed our tasks, about kids attitude to us, first two hours I felt that we were a little bit confused but after few hours this feelings disappeared and we was involved with kids every game and energizer , every day was better, because kids were participated in every task with full of enthusiasm, what was most important for me  they were friendly with other kids and with volunteers. On the second day I was really impressed when we asked them to create summer school’s logo how they worked together and they create really amazing logo, with lot of meaning, they even don’t forget volunteers to put on the logo, they put volunteer’s flags on the logo. The national day was also special, because we saw that kids really enjoyed about presentation and post presentation activities, we show them our counties special features,  brought some Georgian traditional food for them and some of them really liked it. On Friday we were like friends  they communicate with us, trying to teach us some words also they often asks questions about our country and language, most memorable parts of summer school’s fifth day was when Michał said us goodbye because he was going in vacations with his family and bring us some Polish sweets, his attitude to us and smiling eyes was best ending of the day but we were really sad  that he would not spend this five days with us.