On-arrival training in Braga
Ah! We’ve already been here for five months already! The time has passed… how to put it, very relatively: both really quickly and really slowly at the same time. I guess it’s a bit difficult to explain this rationally, so let’s call it the magical time of EVS
So, in accordance with the traditions of Portugal where everything seems to be a bit late, we finally had our on-arrival training.
Não faz mal.
It was literally four days filled with AWESOME!
The event took place in the north, in Braga. Braga is a very beautiful city, but it’s much colder than Lisbon. The leaves were golden and it really felt like autumn there. Though, to be honest, the epic clouds and rain and strong gusts of wind with foggy hills in the background really matched the gloomy gothic environment and we did not much time to leave the hotel anyway.
© Rui Ferreira 2012
So in this appropriately slightly Halloweenish environment me and Alisa spent four wonderful days meeting volunteers from all over the world!
The participants were fabulously adorable young people from all over the world: Finland, Hungary, Spain, Serbia, Denmark, Czech Republic, Italy, Slovenia, France, Greece, Turkey, Austria, Luxembourg and even Angola! I might’ve forgotten a country, with 30 people it was hard to keep track of. So, it was a truly international bunch of people with a common goal of volunteering for (in a nutshell) a better world and experiences.
For many of the other participants it wasn’t really an on-arrival training as well. In fact a girl from Austria is leaving back home next week, but it was fun anyways. We got a lot of answers from the National Agency, also the trainers were professional and managed to build a strong team of very different people from very different countries, which is an incredibly difficult task.
The supercool trainers (© Jowan Philip)
We ate like animals and were starting to think that in the end we will be butchered. The food there was delicious and in addition to a typical hotel breakfast we had two full courses (soup, main dish, dessert) per day. We could feel ourselves getting fatter and fatter with every bite.
~( =^__^= )~
I’m feeling very fat and happy.
The people that we met were really nice and it was very sad to leave. The volunteers are spread all across Portugal, so we have a chance to travel a bit and meet them, so there’s probably gonna be a lot more blog posts about that.
Here we are in the middle of a very cool training course where we had to create tribes in order to learn about communication issues.
© Jowan Philip
I will probably attach more images later
Over and out
<3
Katarina
