Izkušnja španskih udeležencev

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EXPERIENCE OF LAURA, ALEX, GUILLE, LUCÍA, MAR AND FRAN IN CELJE

INTRODUCTION

We are going to explain our lovely experience for a week in Celje, Eslovenia. This summer, seven brave Spanish students went to Celje to live an immersive intercultural project about Radicalism and Hate Speech. We all where from the same part of Spain, Valencia, and we get well which each other really soon. We were willing to arrive and meet new people from different parts of Europe.

ACTIVITIES

Among the activities we take part in were:

City tour around Celje in order to have a first impression of our place for the new days and we also present the national presentations according to our topics. The topic of Spain was extreme nationalism were we talked about the conflict rising up today in Catalunya and of the Vasque Country. Some days after, the organizers prepared a “World Cafe”, which consisted in going through one table to the other and speak about the topic corresponding to that special table which were the ones from the national presentations. Some of them, apart from extreme nationalism, were cultural radicalism and hate speech, bullying and internet hazing and religious and political radicalism.

Finally, one activity which was very interactive, was graffiti hate speech finding. All the participants were divided in groups and needed to go through the city of Celje finding graffiti with hate speech on it. We copy the graffitis in a paper, exactly as they were drawn, and after that, we transformed them into positive messages and beautiful words substituting the hate speech.

LEARNING.

We learn many things there.

Firstly, we learnt how to learn. That is, we found new ways to learn things, like playing some games that had something in common with our topic. For example, when we went to Celje to looking for grafittis.

We also learnt many things about people from other cultures. Besides there was people from Latvia, Italy, Slovenia and Spain, some of them were from other religion too and we learnt a lot from their cultures, and we could discuss about our common and different thoughts.

Finally, we assimilate everything about our topic. It helped us to be better people regarding the hate speech and why we don’t have to use it.

INTERCULTURAL EVENING.

One of the funniest things we did was the intercultural evening, the second day of the week. Each group shared typical food, drinks, music and games from their countries with the other partners and finally, we chose the best group.

Italy brought Italian pasta with pesto and many songs. Latvia brought some Latvian drinks and cheese. Slovenia offered us some traditional food and typical dances. We made Sangria and we brought chorizo, salchichon and Burgo’s cheese.

THE VENUE.

The venue was the MCC Hostel, a lovely youth hostel located in the center of Celje. It has all the services that you need: restaurant, leisure areas, comfortable rooms, a living room and a huge stage to make performances. The hostel was incredibly clean and de the service was nice to all of us.

The only thing that we didn’t like it was the bathroom, because there is only one, so we had to wait a lot of time to have a shower.

CELJE

Celje is a very nice and cute city that we have the pleasure to visit. With the activities that we made during the project, we were able to get to know Celje very detailed. We went to the swimming pool one day; also, we walked around the area when we did the Treasure Hunt arriving to the three house and when we hiked to the castle. Our favourite part was going to the lake and doing water sports.

SUMMARY.

In summary, it was a joyful experience for all of us. This initiative has helped us to meet new people, with different cultures and languages surrounded by good atmosphere. The supervisors of the program and the locals were model hosts and they did not hesitate to help us during the activities. We could not end this review without giving thanks to the Backslash association and the European Youth portal for all the information and the opportunity given to us. So we strongly recommend the Erasmus + project because is a way of self-development and a helpful way to open your mind.

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