8th March
8th March
Arrival to Berlin.
Bulgaria.
Mahatma Gandhi once said that every person can shake the world in a gentle way. I believe that all significant changes throughout history have occurred not because of nations, armies or governments. They happened as a result of the courage and commitements of individuals. So there we were – 5 individuals from Bulgaria, waiting at the Sofia Airport for the plane for Berlin. All of us full of hopes and expectations about the forthcomming two weeks. What was going to happen? What kind of people were we going to meet? And last but not least – were we really going to had the opportunity to shake the world, at least a little bit? Nobody knew… So the plane departured from the airport and in a little while Sofia dissapeared from our sights. Our journey had began and our first stop was Munich. Unfortunately our plane was delayed by another landing plane and we made one more circle over Munich before we landed. Because of that we didn’t had time to taka a look at the Munich airport and were forced to hurry in order not to miss the plane to Berlin. For some people of the gorup this was their first visit to a foreign country and everybody was so excited that we were going to have the opportunity to visit different places in Germany. At the Berlin Airport we met our project liders (Verena and Barbara), we met the other participants form Turkey, Poland and Sweden and all together we took the train for our first destination – Milow.
Sweden.
At one o’clock on Thursday afternoon the Swedish participants met in the departure hall at Copenhagen airport. The feeling that all of us were having was that an adventure was waiting the next two weeks in Germany. Excitement and curiosity can be the words explaining the way we were feeling during that moment. When the airplane left the ground in Denmark this feeling grew stronger and when landing at Tegel Flughafen it was time for meeting the participants from the other countries. As always when meeting a group of people like this there is a lot of handshaking, new faces and names presented that you have forgotten before the next person introduces him or herself. But that does not matter. The important thing was that the participants finally had met. The journey could begin…
France.
Fresh air, tired but smiley face, Ikram, Fanny, Camille, Marion and me (Jessy) we all met us in Lille-Europe, TGV train station of Lille. Let’s go to the “aéroport Charles de Gaulle. After few times, we went outside to take some sunshine. A men came to us, discuss a little bit and went to site few meter near us. Few minutes he stand up and smash the face of a German and went away to saying “I am a Human, I am not a slave ! ”.
We were suprized, What’s happened ? Two Germans were discussing about him and were saying that they could like him. In fact, this man was a migrant, homeless. One of them propose to the migrant a piece of banana. It seems that the guy didn’t understood what they were saying, or maybe yes, but anyway was it’s sure is that he felt kind of insulted, to feel looking, people discuss about him, and maybe I didn’t appreciate so much this banana’s proposition. Charity some times can be like an humiliation. But still why he said “I am a human, I am not a slave” ?
This guy were coming from Romania, were “roma” people are “second class citizen”, he is now migrant in France, homeless, so still out of the “society” so still “second class citizen” . But why “salve” ? Certainly he made a link between this situation with theses two person, his conditions of living in France, and his past, and the history. There were a slavery system in Romania with roma people during few centuries. That’s how we were introduce to the project “European identity and migration”.
The second thing, was a question of the girl to check the boarding pass : “are you camille foubert ?”, ask she to Ikram the woman very surprised. A suspicion feeling came ion the air…. In fact, the computer of Air France made a mistake a gave two boarding pass named “Camille…”
We were prepared for an interesting European youth project !
Germany.
The arrival of the German participants was quite unspectacular compared to the other country arrivals. Despite of Christina, who did the journey from Lüneburg (that is a town near Hambourg in the north of Germany) by train, that took her about five hours. Every body else was coming from Berlin where they’re studying.
Hungary.
How we got from Budapest to Berlin? First a nice flight from Budapest to Munich, though we suspected from the begining that 35 minutes for changing flight in Munich would be something impossible. Also the plane set off with delay from Budapest. But full of with hopes and enthusiasm we expected the best.
In the Munich airport the Hungarian group passed all the obstacles successfully one by one. First the detectore where we all had to take off the shoes; then the slow passport control. The only thing we had left was running the fastest possible because we had only 10 minutes left for the plane to set off for Berlin. Runing through hundreds of gates finally we just found an empty desk with a lady whoinformed us that our plane had just left a few seconds ago. We were then sent to the information board where the official changed our flight so that we could go by the next plane. But the lady was so slow so when she finished the computer work and we could start running to our new gate to an absolutely different direction we could reach the plane for the last call only. But we managed it!!!
Finally we got to Berlin but our little adventure had not finished yet since our packages were not fast enough to follow us to Berlin. So we had to find the place where the packages would be transferred with the next flight. We got almost all of them in 2 hours. We managed it too!!!
For the next day as we got into the project deeper and deeper we forgot about all our exciting adventure at Munich airport.
Milow.
Late evening of the first day of our international adventure and here we are – in Milow. We spent there three days. You can’t really say that Milow is a cultural centre and a homeland of international meetings like ours. Milow is a village, leading its small but steady life beyond the rush of big cities. We were living in a youth hostel, just by a river, very near to the nature park, which Milow is famous for. One main street, two lines of small houses, a pub. Seems like not much, but as many participants emphasise – the connection of sunny weather, green neighbourhood and sounds of birds waking us up every morning, created a grate atmosphere and gave us all good moods. But there are also slightly different opinions as well – although it was very nice to spend some time along pure nature – Pola says – we were lucky to have such a nice weather, because otherwise there wouldn’t be anything special to do in Milow.