16h of sleep - in one week
Our youth exchange in Bílá - 52 different people, 11 different countries
I'm overwhelmed. Still. It might also be because I'm heavily sleep deprived and all I wanna do is lay in bed and cuddle all day.
The youth exhange just blew me away, so many people from different cultures, each one of them unique in their own way. We saw country presenations, from the mountains and woods in East Europe to beaches and the sea in South Europe, a Hungarian fairytale, spicy Romanian bread spread made from veggies, a Greek dance, a short explanation of how Cyprus used to be a mixed country, a Slovak tradition of throwing cold water on their girls, Czech Republic's castles, 47km of Slovenian coastline, chocolate from Sicily, seeing Portugal's (and Europe's) oldest university, Turkish raki and me presenting the day of an average German. It was a blast, even more so when it came to team building via games, sometimes very strategical and physically exhausting, sometimes VÄRY VÄRY intimate and touchy. We had everything.
Including nights that turned to days, us talking and playing games at 4am, some of us slightly dizzy and half dead the next morning, but missing out on all the things we could do was not an option. So...unsurprisingly the vast majority of us got sick, myself included, and we could barely talk. But then there's a game on involving screaming and suddenly you really don't care anymore, because why should you? The experience is unique, we only have it once so we might as well make use of it and enjoy it.
The day came when we all had to say goodbye, goodbye to discussions about Turkey's and German's relations with Murat, goodbye to ex-Yugoslavia lectures by Urban, goodbye to seeing tall Andreas and Andreas the bullet playing together, goodbye to Aycan's quirky personality and competitive team spirit (yes, it actually doesn't contradict itself), goodbye to Peppino's hair, goodbye to Cassiana's contagious smile, goodbye to Tjaša beating anyone else in running, goodbye to convincing Marcel that he is in fact a feminist, goodbye to all those amazing people. But it won't be forever, I'm very sure.
And as I look out of the window in the office right now, seeing the rain slightly hugging the trees, the grey sky and the wet leaves falling to the ground, I think that taking a couple days off to fly to Italy, Greece or Cyprus during cold times might not be a bad idea...