Bálizs Vendel: Imagine I was looking forward to this Erasmus project

It was a great adventure for me because it was the first time I travelled by plane, my first international project and the first two weeks that I had to speak only English. The flight to Rome was very cool, we arrived at around 9 o’clock and we spent a rainy morning there. After that, we went to Naples, we immediately took the underground to Leopardi station where our hotel was. The hotel was on the seaside with a very pretty view on the sea and the Vesuvius volcano.

On the first Monday we got to know each other a bit, we met the participants of the other countries: Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Spain. From the first moment, everybody could talk with each other, the communication was easy. Before each activity, we played energizer games, they were creative and pleasant. We had fantastic conversations almost every night, everybody was there and talking to everybody. When a group was not there, it meant that they went sightseeing to a town nearby.

In the next three days, there were mostly theoretical seminars, well-organized and built on each other, where we learned about the basics of story-telling and the ground rules of photography and secrets of creating comics. After this we started the more exciting tasks. On Thursday and Friday we had to do a remake of a famous movie scene and to take pictures for a comic. We had a wonderful time.

On Saturday we were divided into international groups and we had to make a 10 minutes-long interactive story-telling video for the kids. We were working on this task for three days. At the beginning we were thinking a lot, did some brainstorming and created the final video on Monday morning. Based on the kids’ reaction the presentation was successful.

On Monday evening, we had an official dinner. For starter, we had pasta like on every other day, then fish as a main dish. My favorite dessert was the strawberry cake. On Tuesday we said goodbye to each other, shared our experiences and feelings about these days. On Wednesday morning, we went to Naples again, did some sightseeing (Torre del Greco, Pompeii, Sorrento), then we went to Rome by train. We had our flight at 4pm and arrived to Budapest around 6pm.

To sum up, this trip was a real miracle for me, I got to know about the south Italian lifestyle. I made a lot of new friends, met very interesting people and learned a lot about digital story-telling. It was a good opportunity to practice English and a bit of Italian. I saw places that I wanted to see for a long time, I could travel by plane and really fast train, I could swim and hear the sound of the sea. Thank you Erasmus+ and Poli for this experience!