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Before my On Arrival Training, I knew Bucharest only from the visionary tales of Cartarescu, and before that I could scarcely distinguish it from Budapest in my mind.
My group arrived from Craiova with an early train, and at noon we were already in the Capital.
The gray of the industrial, squared buildings seemed to melt with the grayish, cloudy sky.
A lot of cars and people going up and down across the streets, not so different from the ones from Craiova, just more filled with advertisement and shops.
Some trees in small parks, their bare branches pointing to the dull vastness above our heads.
In a coldness that seemed to enter even though our heavy clothes, we marched in the city, everything new yet oddly familiar to us.
The centre, full of cozy places, libraries and art galleries, international brands together with small Romanian shops, souvenirs and second hand shops and small kiosks selling covrigi and placinta and colorful flowers, strange spots of color in the winter gray and white hues.
We were excited at the perspective of meeting new people from all over the world, volunteers like us, ready to share their experiences with us, and also about the activities we would take part in.
During this week, we received information about volunteering and technical issue related to it.
Notwithstanding the fact that it was a bit strange to receive this kind of information so late in the EVS (we had our OAT at the beginning of our third month in Romania), they were very useful, and each session was extremely interesting, since we had energizers and other tools and learning methods related to non formal education, that we can reuse for our own activities.
The trainers were very nice, and organized a lot of interesting activities for us.
It was also a challenging experience, somehow, since we had to work together with new people, whom we first met in Bucharest during the training, but this was useful to learn how to develop and improve our teamwork, that is extremely necessary in our volunteers job.
As for me, I also had an extra challenge: me and other three volunteers had to organize the Intercultural evening, with just two or three days in advance.
It was stressing and amazing at the same time: it was hard to have the responsibility of everything, but at the same time it was also funny to organize things and try to solve the situation we had to tackle, like in a game. In the end, everything was fine, thanks also to the work of the others, who had to make a presentation of their Country, and made a wonderful job, with games, dances and music.
The moment that I preferred was the city game.
Basically, we had a list of tasks that we had to fulfill wandering in the city divided in teams.
Useless to say, they were all super embarrassing.
For example, we had to stop ten people and ask them if they were born in Bucharest or not, to ask if they could teach us their traditional hora dance and dance it in public and to tell us jokes.
Among the easier tasks, we had things like taking pictures in front of monuments and historical buildings.
In my team I had two Spanish girl
s, a girl coming from Netherlands, who also helped me with the organization of the event, and an Italian boy.
We left the hotel in a sunny afternoon, eager to explore a bit the city after all the time we spent inside it for the training.
After taking the metro, we headed to the University, were we hoped to find some students who could help us, being younger and able to speak English (at least this is what we hoped for).
We first went to take a selfie in front of the National Theatre and the monument called ‘Zero kilometer of Democracy’, a colorful milestone in front of the building, that was placed there after the revolution that signed the fall of communism in Romania in 1989.
Actually, this is the second ‘Zero Kilometer’, the first one being the one near University square, made by the sculptor Costantin Baraschi.
This fact created a lot of confusion among the teams, so while someone took the picture in front of the first monument, some others took it in front of the second one.
Then we started walking toward the University, in the coldness of the approaching sunset, laughing and talking and trying desperately to achieve our goals, and having a lot of fun while visiting the city.
It was great to meet all these new people, having the possibility of talking with them about our lives and experiences, our Countries and hopes for the future.
Each of us has different character and behaviors, different dreams and hopes and projects for the future, different cultures and believes, but these differences didn’t prevent us from creating a bond and becoming friends.
Again, differences were a richness, not an obstacle.
And, after all, notwithstanding the nationality, every people behaves in the same way in front of a buffet, as we had the opportunity to see during the OAT.
The On Arrival Training was a meaningful experience.
I learned new things, developed more awareness about my role as a volunteer and received a lot of important information, but I also had fun with my old friends and the new people I met.
The time we spent together, even if short, was very intense, and I will always treasure the moments we shared.