10 days in Szczecin

This article is based on my impression about the first 10 days that I’ve been here in Szczecin, on which I’ve already could make an idea about its people, customs and culture.
 

Only one month before coming I had notice about what EVS was and I decided to sign into all the short term projects that exist for this summer. From some of them I received emails saying that were complete and from others nothing, so I’ve given it up. But suddenly… I saw one message in my mail: “I am happy to inform you that it would a pleasure for us to host you as a EVS Volunteers during our project "Multi Kulti" :) I hope you are ready to join and we will see each other in 10 days!” 10 DAYS? It seemed completely crazy, all my plans of the summer changed in just one moment… and that’s when started the adventure.
 

Szczecin. I had to search in google translator how to pronounce the name of this city just for be able to answer to all of them that ask me: oh, Poland, and which city? S…z…c…z…ecin. The beginning of my trip was a bit accidently (my DNI was expired so I lost my flight) but as soon I arrived all started to be great.

VOLUNTEERS AND MEMBERS OF THE ASSOCIATION

Firstly I thought that it was to be difficult to communicate between us (Spanish, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Rumanian and Polish people) by using a foreign language for all of us and with our respective accents, but it didn’t. Since the first day that we started the workshops the members of the association made us feeling like at home, they said that all that were there it was as our like theirs during this project, and gave us totally freedom for eat there, use all the materials, rooms… so I can say that polish people are very hospitable!

Volunteers soon started to take a lot of confidence between us, we’ve just arrived and we only have been 10 days together but it seems like we’ve known for a long time. I suppose that the fact of living all together in a student dormitory and do the same activities in a foreign country make us join fast.

MULTI KULTI ACTIVITIES

On the beginning of this week we started the activities of Multi Kulti project with children. They are great, they don’t speak English but it makes this more interesting: we communicate each other by gests and the volunteers from Poland help us to translate the games and activities. It’s easy to see that they are excited of being with people from different countries, they have fun teaching us words in polish that we have to repeat, they bring us bracelets, they want us to write dedications in their notebooks and paint their autographs in our arms… they are really nice! And they also are excited to show us their own culture, language and games.

CULTURE: PEOPLE, MANNERS, SCHEDULE AND FOOD

People in general are very nice, they try to help you in all that they can and are open to foreign people, although there are not too much people that speak English here, so sometimes I’ve been hours in the supermarket trying to find products that I don’t even know if exist in Poland and trying to decipher the tags in polish…!

What really struck me during these days are the good manners that polish people have. I still can’t understand why people wait to the traffic lights turned green to cross (why? If there aren’t cars coming??) Or understand why everybody pays the ticket of the tram despite there isn’t anybody who asks you for them, thing that in Spain probably the most part wouldn’t do… (So at least that the association gave us monthly tickets, just for avoid problems because I know how we are…)

About the schedule of life I can’t talk a lot because we have our own timetable and we have lunch at 16, 16:30… but it mustn’t be the most common here, taking into account that at 4am the sun rises. The sun rises at 4am… and there aren’t blinds! I think this is the only thing that I really don’t like about here, in my country and also in some countries of other volunteers we are used to sleep in total darkness, so we have to be imaginative and we are using towels, cartons, blankets… for be able to sleep!

I still have to try typical dishes from here because at the moment I’ve only tried “gulash” that came accompanied by the famous “ogorki”. It wasn’t bad at all… but I had in mind a completely different thing when I ordered this from the restaurant (gulas in Spain is a kind of seafood) and it was a total surprise when I saw I kind of lentils with meat and accompanied by gherkins (hot gherkins). So I have to continue testing polish food to be able to talk about it.

In conclusion my experience in Szczecin until now is being really great, so I recommend to anybody who is thinking of join in an EVS project or not that should do it! You won’t regret it because is an experience where you can bring a lot but take much much more ;) 

Cristina Vera, Szczecin, 23-07-2014 

Cristina is one of 10 European Volunteers and is taking part in a MULTI KULTI project co-financed by Erasmus+ Youth Programme.