My first month in Lithuania

Hi everybody, I'm Daniele from Italy, and I can proudly inaugurate this year's posts on the Aukštaitija National Park volunteer's blog by telling about my first month in Lithuania!

It has been quite a tough beginning, but since my arrival things have kept getting better and better. The main problem was the bad weather: seems like I had the luck to come here right in a year when winter just doesn't want to come to an end, and snow and cold make it hard to find tasks or activities to do outdoors. I haven't had much work to do yet, beside some translations, and there was no way to go out by bike, with all that ice and snow on the roads! On the bright side, this gave me more free time to get used to the new place, culture, people and way of living! It was a huge cultural clash finding myself living in the same house with a Lithuanian family, even having to share bathroom and kitchen with them for a while, and being in a new work place where very few people can speak some English. Luckily, those were all very nice people, which helped a lot, despite some lack of communication. Astra's (my language teacher with whom I live with) family has been very friendly and helped me a lot with anything, and Linas (my mentor) as well!

Despite preventing me from most of outdoors activities, I enjoyed snow for a while, since it was my first time dealing with it! In my hometown it never snows, and I had barely seen some snow while traveling, but never really been on it, so I had a lot of new esperiences to try! I saw frozen lakes for my first time and walked on it (and I almost fell into a not-so-frozen pond!), I walked into deep snow, I got stuck with the car with the park's staff, I built a snowman, I peed my name on the snow... but I still miss a snowfight, a snow angel and some skiing!

I didn't have the chance to see much of the park yet, except for a few tours around with the staff, but while translating the website and the leaflets from English to Italian I had the chance to learn a lot about it and it really seems to be a wonderful place which I just can't wait to visit by bike and enjoy in summer. Finally spring seems to be shyly coming, and looks like the long wait is almost over, as the real beginning is coming soon!