The Mountains Are Calling And We Must Go

Info-pack

Youth Exchange

📍 Izvoare, Romania

📅 6-15 May 2023

🇷🇴 🇭🇺 🇵🇹 🇨🇿

About the project

Project's aims

The goal of the project was to enable 40 young people from Romania, Hungary, Czechia and Portugal to engage in intercultural dialogue and experience the benefits of hiking in an experiential way.

The specific objectives reached are:

the development of positive attitudes and understanding of 41 young people from Romania, Hungary, Czechia and Portugal to engage in intercultural dialogue with young people from countries other than their own;
increased knowledge and skills of 41 young people regarding safe hiking;
raised awareness of the importance of the balance between people and nature and promoted the benefits of hiking in the four partner communities.

Activities

Social Contract

Group work

Intergenerational dialogue

Truck experience

Team building

Intercultural dialogue

A glimpse from our youth exchange

a

Hike to the Zetea Lake

Finally, we had the chance to put into practice what we had learned and prepared for in the previous days. The sun was on our side, and rain gave us a break :D.

From our accommodation, we followed the Lukats Zsolt hiking trail. At some point, we moved away from the trail and walked several kilometres extra. It was a way of improving our condition. On our way, we admired the beautiful scenery, everything was green, and the clouds in the sky created a beautiful contrast with the blue.

We had a longer break once we arrived at the dam, taking pictures and having snacks and drinks. After the walk, our appetite was not to be neglected.

Then we continued hiking closer to the lake, where we could rent kayaks and enjoy the view while paddling. Others decided to play volleyball or try out different swings available. The bravest among us decided to swim in the lake. It was a beautiful day in nature, even though some of us got sore feet from walking, so much in return.

Hike to Harghita Madarasi

We started the expedition with a short walk to our transportation point. There our beloved vehicle was a tractor, a lovely, green, BIG AND LONG tractor, which we would use to go up the mountain. It looked like we were going to catch the peer. The trailer was supplied with some benches where we could sit very comfortably. We arrived at a plateau after an hour, then why not let's go for another walk, a slippery one to the highest peak of the mountain at 1801 meters high. At that height, we had snow in MAY. It was amusing and not annoying at all ;) the group fell a lot, but we enjoyed the hike.

We had mayonnaise and ketchup. At the top, what a surprise, a Hungarian cemetery, built to honour some fallen soldiers.

We took some pictures with the crosses, very respectful, we didn't do weird things with them...no no, last thing, a group picture and then we left.

The trip back to the plateau was even more funnier. We slipped, and pretty much that's it. But it was funny, then back to the plateau where we bought some souvenirs. With what do you think we got home? With a tractor.. again. We enjoyed the walk to the accommodation.

THE WHOLE DAY WAS AMAZING AND MEMORABLE.

WhatsApp Video 2023-05-13 at 14.12.49.mp4

VIDEO (1).mp4

Acting responsible towards nature

What to do when getting lost during hiking?

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Do you like hiking (1).mp4

Tips and tricks when hiking

WhatsApp Video 2023-05-13 at 12.48.59.mp4

Things we learned about each other's countries

Food: We tried basically every snacks and drinks
Language: We learnt the foreign names of a few numbers. We did some tongue twisters and sayings and idioms.
Traditional Games: We tried the countries traditional games while doing the energisers in the beginnings of the cultural nights.
Traditional Dance: We did traditional dances at the ends of the cultural nights that everyone enjoyed
History: The countries representing themselves did an interesting presentation about their history and ongoing politics.
Geography: We learned about the coastlines and highest points of the countries. They visualised the location of their countries on the map.

Video of our project

Check our Photo Gallery

Dissemination

Czech Republic

On 24th May we from the participants from the Czech group were doing a dissemination in the form of a presentation in front of more than 50 people from our school.

We were talking about the benefits of hiking and the benefits of projects like this, what can it be good for and how to participate in similar projects in the future. We showed our photos and videos, answered interesting questions that our classmates asked us and of course, we told them about our beautiful memories!

- Andrej Krečmer

Hungary

Participants have prepared a presentation for their colleagues and classmates in school. They have shared their personal experience, memorable moments from the project and promoted hiking among those who attended the project.

Portugal

Participants taking part in the youth exchange have held a worshop for children in which they presented the benefits of spending time in nature and used the non-formal methods they have experienced during the project.

Romania

Event 1

For this part of our dissemination, we decided to talk to the students of the eleventh grade, describing what happened in each of the day of the project. We talked about the energizers and gave some examples, not forgetting to mention their importance. We focused on making the most out of the presentation by explaining the activities while classifying them in various categories: name learning, team building, even describing the intercultural evening in a fun way in order to catch everyone’s attention. We talked about the timetable and the breaks. Of course, we didn’t forget to mention the project details, such as the countries where the other participants came from or what the subject of the project was. We presented in front of almost 30 people, making it a success.

Event 2

During this part of our dissemination, we decided to talk to the tenth grade students. We explained the activities that took place, we told them about each country’s cultural evening, about what food we had, what traditions each country has, and much more related to everyone’s unique, own culture, as to make the atmosphere between us more friendly and comfortable. We also told them about energizers and, last but not least, about the hikes we went on, in which some of us had a few funny incidents, but also accidents.

Event 3

Our main purpose for this dissemination was to educate the students from our school on Erasmus+ opportunities, what is a YouthPass certificate and what is it useful for and what happened in the Youth Exchange in which we participated from 5-16th May 2023 in Izvoare, Harghita.

This dissemination took place on the 13 of May, 2023 at the Pedagogical Highschool ”Regina Maria” in Deva. We started the dissemination process with explaining how a Youth Exchange works and how you can apply for it online.

This information was followed up with a PowerPoint presentation with photos from all the activities that we did during this project, while also sharing some useful tips for hiking for the slides that included pictures from our hikes. At the end we explained what the YouthPass certificate is and how it is useful when applying for a job or a university outside our country and then showed our classmates the promo video for the project.

We shared this with 75 people (in 3 sessions, 25 people for each) and the targeted audience was both students that could apply for projects like these in the future and teachers.

I would say our success rate was high as in the end the teachers were asking a lot of questions about our experience and our classmates felt motivated to apply for Erasmus projects in the future.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

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