Szia mindenkinek!
I am sure everybody is wondering, what has this girl been doing in Bucharest? Well, it is a pretty long story so I might start from the very beginning. It was Saturday the 2nd of February when my friend Alba and I embarked on a 14-hour train journey to Bucharest as part of our EVS on arrival training.
I had never before been on a train for such a long time and, as the hours passed, I started feeling more and more tired. We bought a lot of food supplies for the journey, took two or three books to read and downloaded a few movies in an attempt to make time move faster. You would be surprised to know all of the random things that happen during the night in a train 😓.
We finally arrived the next morning and went straight to the Ibis hotel 🏨. The idea of sleeping seemed tempting but we knew that we would not have a lot of opportunities to visit Bucharest and its surrounding. Our touristic visit of the city included the Palace of Parliament and both the National museums of art and history, before we started wondering around the city and enjoying whatever it had to offer.
During the next few days I had the pleasure to meet amazing people who were just like me volunteering with other associations in Rumania. From 10:00 to 19:00 we would have the training sessions where we learned everything that we needed to know about the EVS formalities, how to deal with emotional problems, ways to approach our respective projects…
However, I was not expecting at all to create such a strong bond with all volunteers in only a week. There were a lot of people coming from different parts of Europe, and it was astonishing for me to see how the EVS had also reached countries such as Turkey and Egypt! 🌍 Despite being all extremely different, we all shared the same common values and had a lot of fun getting to know each other’s culture.
The international cultural night was another of the highlight of this trip. Every country that was participating at the time in the training had to make a creative presentation to demonstrate president Trump that if “America comes first”, then their country comes second. For me Germany and Georgia were the ones who stood up the most! It seems that for Germans drinking beer is like having a religious experience and thus, German volunteers decided that the best way to demonstrate that their country comes second was by putting some church music and start giving away free German beers for everyone to drink! I mean…. crazy, right? Meanwhile, the volunteer from Georgia decided it was better to switch off the room lights, put some Georgian typical music and start jumping around the room while talking in his mother tongue and drinking wine! The rest of us was surrounding him in a circle while laughing because of the confusing situation and trying to imitate his movements.
Nobody slept for more than 5 hours per day that week because we usually went out after dinner to dance or have some drinks at someone’s room in the hotel. I was enjoying so much the moment that I felt as if time had stopped and that week was never going to end. Needless to say how happy I was for not having to cook nor clean my room.
Now Rumania does not feel as empty and scary knowing that everywhere I go, I will have someone with whom to stay and create new and amazing memories. This is an experience that I will always have present in my memory and dearly close to my heart. Hopefully I will see them all again in the midterm EVS training! 🥰
