ARE WE THE SAME?

By Sergio Dopico, 4th year ESO.

In a recent exchange of students to Romania and Budapest, we met a lot of people, teachers and students from the different countries which are taking part in our project: Romania (obviously), Poland, Sweden, Turkey and Italy. And in Budapest… In Budapest, we met a lot of people, but almost no one was Hungarian... When we arrived there, we were surprised because it was like our city (Ferrol), but much bigger and with really nice buildings.

We had decided to meet the participants from the other schools in Budapest to carry out some work on the Erasmus + project: What's New on the News?, that's writing articles about interesting topics. So, on the first day, we met the Polish and the Italian teams. In the beginning, we were very nervous about meeting other people from different countries, but we were enthusiastic, too. We had dinner together and, to our surprise, we became friends very soon. The communication was fluent and easy and even one of our mates, who has a personality a bit different to the rest, found a soul mate amongst the Polish students: they liked the same music, the same books, films, etc.

On the second day, we met the Swedish and Turkish teams on the bus that would take us to Beius, in Romania. It was a long trip but we had a lot to know about the others so we didn't mind! At our arrival, we met our Romanian mates.

 

During the week, we realized that some of our previous ideas about other countries weren't true: one would expect that a girl in our group wearing a veil would be Turkish, and she was Italian while the Turkish students and teachers weren't wearing veils at all, Romanian people are very friendly and helpful, and their country is becoming a modern one, Italians work hard... When it came to work, we had to record a video news programme where we would be the presenters, all of us rehearsed hard and felt nervous, independently of the nationality, level of English or age.

About culture, and talking about Romania, their religion is Orthodox and churches are next to their graveyards, like in Ferrol. We visited a small very ancient one which was made from timber. We learnt that its roof, now, is covered with metal panels because of lack of money to repair it when the old wooden one was damaged.

 

Our Romanian mates shared with us some aspects of their culture: a traditional wedding in Romania (they played it on our last day), their food, clothes etc. We became aware that people in Romania appreciate their culture a lot and try to keep it. And we shared with them our "teen culture". You know? We taught them words in Spanish that teenagers use, and vice versa.  

 

 

About the importance of participating in a project like this... I think that it is a really good idea to do this kind of projects because teenagers like to learn about the culture from other countries and this is also a good opportunity to go on enjoyable trips where we can meet really good people, feel more European and communicate in English.