After we arrived in Trakai and found our hotel we had enough time to unpack and have lunch. After that we started with presenting ourselves as we had a new girl from Sweden who works in a social project in a private orphanage. Then we had time to present the taste of our EVS - everybody brought food and drinks and we had a great time tasting different cherry wines from Žagarė regional park. We also enjoyed Lenka's home produces vegetables, a Russian salad prepared by Spanish people and two cakes bought from Adrian and the other volunteers from the shop in Trakai. We also played a lot of logic games and I can say that we are not the brightest young people but we are so much fun! :)
The second day was very intense as we had a lot of things to talk about. Until lunch we had to discuss the dilemmas and questions from the project but this was not a very useful task as all solutions sent us back to the problems. Anyway after that we had some activities outside which cheered us up!
After that we had a treatment for body and soul - we went all together at the aqua park and enjoyed the jacuzzi, the swimming pool with its slides (there were some accidents of course, but don't worry - we have AXA!) and all kinds of sauna!
The third day of our training we spent in Vilnius. Until lunch we were geocaching around the capital - this is an outdoor recreational activity, in which the participants use a GPS and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world. We divided into teams and started. During the implementation of this task we got to see the President of Lithuania! I really enjoyed this activity because it gave me the opportunity to visit places in Vilnius I have never seen and I can say the game is quite catchy - when you are so close to your cache and you can't see it it just drives you crazy and you can spend hours until you find it. And Vilnius is just lovely - definitely much better than Tallinn! We found 4 caches out of 4! Daniele's team found 7 or 8 chaches but they continued even after lunch while we went to a very nice french cafe and enjoyed some drinks and chess games!
On Saturday morning we started with some brainstorming and we came up with a lot of great ideas to carry out until the end of our projects. For example Daniele and I and the swedish girl who works in an orphanage decided to organize a visit in our park for the children in her project - to show them around the park and create some games and workshops for them!
After lunch we made a conference and discussed different topics regarding the Lithuanian culture as Marriage, Suicide, Timing and Food. From all four only the first one was positive, but we also discussed the reasons for the others. In the evening we were quite tired but some went for a walk to Trakai Castle while others (me) enjoyed a beer and a cat cuddle in the garden of the hotel!
The last day we talked about the reintegration to our home countries as well as different opportunities and what to do after EVS. We were very pleasantly surprised when our trainers suggested us to write letters to our future selves and told us that they will make sure that we will receive these letters when we get back home! We also wrote some words to each other and put in the envelopes as a surprise.
Before going back to our projects we went to the aqua park to enjoy the jacuzzi and the sauna for the last time, and here I would like to express our gratitude to the National Agency of Lithuania for the great accommodation they provided for us during the training!
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