Lisbon

Last weekend I finally had my first international trip since I’m here: I visited Lisbon! :) It has been on my “bucket list” for quite a while, but from Hungary tickets were always too expensive; so when I saw last month that from here I could get cheap train tickets I decided that it’s time to go. :) The original idea was to visit a friend of mine who lives there, but unfortunately he had to go on a business trip, so in the end I couldn’t meet him. :(

Nevertheless I had a great time, thanks to my CouchSurfing host Bruno. He not only took me around the city, but we went to Sintra, Cabo da Roca and Cascais too. I also had the chance to have lunch with his family which was a really great experience; I could literally get a taste of the local culture. :)

Torre de Belém

Praca de Comercio

View of Lisbon from the castle 

The same view an hour later :)

The castle

Street art 

Sintra 

Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra

Amazing view on the ocean from Cabo da Roca, the Westernmost point of Europe

On my last day I took a free walking tour as well in Lisbon (this is something I do in almost every city I visit). It was really cool, our guide Cuco was very funny and the group was also so nice that in the end we decided to have lunch together. Speaking of food, the "national fish" in Portugal is the codfish - they have around 1000 different ways of preparing it. I tried only 3, but they were all delicious. :)

Rossio square with typical Portuguese pavement

The famous tram 28 :)

Cuco explaining how lazy people were to remove decorations after the last festival. :)

Random street - down and up :)

Sunset view from one of Lisbon's viewpoints

Week of fame

Last week we had our week of fame. :) No, this doesn't mean fancy red carpet events, paparazzi or getting rich (at least not in terms of money), but we did get an invitation to the local radio for an interview. 

So last Wednesday we went and had a very nice chat about what we do here at Ecocompartimos, what is Erasmus+ and EVS, what kind of programs we organize, how we feel here in Spain, how do we spend our time and so on. I've never ever had such an experience before (certainly not in Spanish), so I was a little nervous in the beginning, but the girl interviewing us was so nice and had such good questions, that it turned out to be a very good experience. :) I also hope that it will help us in making our activities at least a little bit better known here in Illescas.

If you're interested you can listen to it here. (only available in Spanish)

Dilya and me waiting for the interview to start

Together with Helena, we are ready to talk :)

After the interview when we got back to the shop we had another nice surprise: we are featured in the local newspaper too! :) We sent them the article weeks ago, but had no idea if they were to publish it or not... finally they did, so we had another round of "publicity" for our activities. :)

THE article :)

The girls excited about the article :)

PS: On a different topic, I finished my first piece made of mosaic, here it is:

:)

Activities in October

I think there are 2 basic criteria to measure if you’re “at home” in a new place:

• You bump into people you know on the street randomly.
• People ask for directions from you. (For me this actually means that I look “local enough”. :))

Well this is of course nothing scientific or very serious, just something I “measure” for myself for fun, and I’m proud to say, that after 2 months here I managed to fulfill both. Okay, it was not so hard as this is a small town, but still. :)

All kidding aside, I started to feel more at home now here in Illescas. I enrolled to a zumba class (those of you who don’t know me, I started zumba 4 years ago and still love it, so this was an important step :)) and I also joined a mosaic class. The latter was quite an impulse decision, but as I have a curiosity for creative things (and this year is about trying new things), I thought why not. And so far I like it a lot, though I haven’t finished my first piece yet.

In October I had quite some other activities: last Friday I went to an open Latin dance class (already for the second time). This was something I wanted to try for a long time and I’m happy I finally did, because it was really great. :) We were taught bachata: first the basic steps and then we got into couples and did some turns too besides just stepping from left to right. As we were rotating, everyone got to dance with everyone, which was really good, because we had a mixed level of knowledge, so like this I felt less embarrassed of messing up the moves from time to time. :)

I also participated in a “pasacalle” (parade) a couple of weeks ago: a group of actors dressed up in traditional costumes and told us legends from Toledo as a part of the El Greco year (in 2014 there are all kinds of festivities for El Greco here). They played music too and showed us some dances as we went around the town with them; it was very nice (and easy to understand :)).

And for the first time in my life I went to a fashion show to the neighboring town with some friends, it was really good. :)

At Ecocompartimos we have also a lot of activities going on: in October we started English conversation classes on Mondays (after a month we have more and more people coming :)) and we organized 2 more sessions of the “intercultural meeting” series I mentioned earlier: one of them was about typical food of different countries and the other was about typical dresses.

Both were really good, for the gastronomical one we all prepared something, so we had a bite of many countries: Spain, Morocco, Russia, Romania and of course Hungary.

Learning things about Morocco

And about Spain too :)

The feast

Then for the one with the dresses unfortunately I didn’t have anything Hungarian to put on, but I showed some pictures and 2 of the participants dressed up in typical Spanish dresses. We had a great time. :)

With the Spanish ladies :)

I enjoy these talks a lot as we always learn many new things about each country and have great discussions. In November we'll have 2 more sessions: one about music and another is about things in our countries that we are proud of or ashamed of. I'm looking forward to them. :)

Consuegra

Last Sunday I had a lovely one-day excursion with Helena, her family and her friends to a village called Consuegra (it’s around 60 km away from Toledo to the South). The place is known for the windmills of Don Quixote: in one episode of Cervantes’ famous novel Don Quixote arrived to this place to fight the windmills, which he thought were giants. :) I don’t really know how the story ends, but the place looks beautiful: basically the village lies right next to a hill and on the top there are 12 very nice white windmills (each of them named after a character from the book) and a castle. And of course the view is amazing.

First we went to visit one of the windmills, there watched a video of how the flour used to be grained and also - to my surprise - I learnt that the mills were designed in a way that it is possible to turn the roof around to "adjust" it better to the wind.

Don Quixote greeted us at the entrance :)

Inside

View from the mill

Then we participated in a theatrical tour in the castle. This was great fun, there were 4 actors dressed up in authentic clothes and they were guiding us around, but interactively: for example at one point we all received wooden swords and they taught us how to "fight". Then at another scene we all had to bow when the king entered the room. :) I enjoyed it a lot, although sometimes they spoke “ancient” Spanish, so I couldn’t understand much of these parts.

After this we had a nice picnic, as the weather was very sunny and then decided to go for a walk in a forest nearby to hear the rutting of the deer. We could hear some noises, but we didn’t see any deer unfortunately. But I enjoyed the landscape too, it was different from the surroundings of Illescas and also from the forests we have in Hungary.

Lights at the end of the day :)

Training in Santiago de Compostela

Last week I had a 5 days long “on arrival” training in Santiago de Compostela. The aim of the training was basically to help the volunteers who arrived recently to Spain to integrate a little easier: we had some sessions about the culture of Spain, practical information about EVS and the EU, some time to discover Santiago and A Coruña and of course many games to get to know each other better. :) We were altogether 26 people from many countries and it was really great; it reminded me a lot the AIESEC conferences we used to have. We had a very intense schedule, most of the sessions were in Spanish (though by the end of the week we spoke more of a mixture language of everything) and of course we didn’t get much sleep as we went out for some drinks almost every day. :)

I have to say I enjoyed this training more than I thought: at first I was a little worried, as most of the other volunteers are much younger than me (many of them are 18-19-20 years old), so I had no idea whether I was going to get on well with them, but of course this was an obstacle only in my head: everyone was very open-minded, mature and fun, so the age really didn’t matter. :) We had great discussions and I have to say it was very inspiring to see so much enthusiasm and curiosity for the world (which I haven’t seen much lately in the corporate world unfortunately).

I don’t want to describe each session we had in details, but only the ones I liked the most: we had a game to discover Santiago, where we were divided into 4 groups. Each group got a list of things we needed to accomplish: we needed to take group pictures in funny/hidden places in different parts of the city. We had a lot of fun: in the beginning everyone was a little lost, but after the first few obstacles we became braver and also felt more like a team.

We had also a trip to A Coruña: first we had an official presentation of one organization there and a panel discussion with different people who talked about their EVS experience. After this we had some free time, so we could go and see the city. The weather was amazing, so we decided to go to the beach (not to swim, but just to enjoy the view), it was great to “meet” the Atlantic Ocean for the first time not from a plane. :)

There was one more thing I liked a lot: we got a little book where we can define and then track our own EVS experience and learning. Goal setting is also something I had earlier in AIESEC (and even later in my life), but I still very much enjoyed re-learning the importance of this, as I haven't really thought it through regarding my EVS specifically. So now here is the time. :)

Here are a few more pictures of this amazing week:

The Cathedral of Santiago

Beautiful view of Santiago's old town

Nice park right next to the old town

Some of us enjoying the beach in A Coruña

The whole team at Torre de Hercules