Intercultural Easter meeting

Dear people,

Last Tuesday we had an intercultural Easter meeting at the language café. The event was quite a success since surprisingly many people showed up and the atmosphere was cozy. Also the variety of the countries where people came from was wide: besides our volunteers from Spain, Greece and Finland, there were students from Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and obviously from Poland. Moreover, the boss of the language school is from Moldova and she also knows the Romanian culture really well. The composition of the group was ideal for the topic of the day, I learnt more about Easter traditions in different countries than I would have ever expected!

International Easter fact sheet

People brought lots of food to the meeting, which made me really happy. We had Polish soups and sweets, some Romanian sweets and a plenty of eggs. We started the meeting by learning something about Greek, Finnish, Spanish, Moldovan and Romanian Easter in pictures. Especially in Spain they have some traditions that seem weird for a foreigner, such as dressing up as Nazarenos who awkwardly resemble the members of KKK. But when you think about it, it's actually great that they haven't let the horrors of another continent suppress their own beautiful traditions! In Greece Easter includes flying kites, eating a lot of food and tapping red-colored eggs onto each other to see who manages to crack the other person's egg first. In Finland, at least for me and my family, Easter is just a celebration of chocolate eggs, bunnies and witches without any religious aspects, but some people celebrate Easter also for religious reasons.

After having learnt about the traditions, we put them into practise and played the Greek egg-cracking game and spouted water on each other, following the Polish Wet Monday tradition.

Yours,

Petja

Ps. Follow us on Instagram too: @obcywpultusku

The International Easter Egg is arising

The Egg Fight

The best part: Easter sweets!

La Fiesta Española

¡Hola!

On Saturday the 27th of February I gave a presentation on the topic Spanish Fiesta at the Children’s University of Pułtusk.  Now I’m going to tell you how it was and what we did.

During the second week of my stay in Poland, me and the other two volunteers organized a language café in the Bar Restaurant Magdalenka. There I met the director of the Children’s University of Pułtusk, we talked about our EVS projects and she asked me if I’d like to give a presentation about Spain at the Children’s University. I agreed and my EVS coordinator Sylwia organized the meeting.

On Saturday I woke up at 8:30 am, I was a bit tired but motivated for the event. I prepared a Power Point presentation with pictures of Spanish landscapes and celebrations, cooked a tortilla de patatas (Spanish omelette) and prepared some games for the kids. After having prepared everything I walked out of the house to the meeting place. I arrived ten minutes late, because I didn't know how to get there, but Google Maps helped me! The place was a big university library and at first I didn't find the right room, but eventually Joana came to the main door and took me to the right place.

In the room there were ten kids and other people waiting for my presentation. I started talking about Spain and Joana translated everything, I gave my Power Point presentation quite quickly as I know that kids don´t want to see Power Point presentations, but they want to play games and dance (who doesn’t?).

After the presentation I played them the Spanish song La Macarena and the kids started to dance. I don't know why, but everybody loves that song and they love to dance to it, the kids danced it really well, better than me for sure! After the dance I gave people tortilla de patatas, and they liked it, some people even asked for another piece. I think it was the best tortilla I’ve ever made, I was so happy to see that the kids loved my tortilla.

Another activity I did after the tortilla was teaching some very simple Spanish words, like buenos días, good morning and buenas noches, good night. They said the words aloud and Joana translated them into Polish. 

Teaching some Spanish

Following the Spanish lesson, I showed the kids another power point presentation, this time about Spanish fauna, and we played an animal sound game. Everyone said his/her own name and made an animal sound. Almost everybody chose the wildcat for their sound, which is a good reason the say that cats are the best animals!

After the presentations and dances came the funniest part: the moment of the BULL! I went out of the room and dressed as a Spanish bull. For my dress, I only wore a big black trash bag. I forgot to paint my face with black to make it more realistic, but the kids enjoyed the game anyway. I came back to the room and chased the kids as a bull: it was a lot of fun for me and for them. They were trying to run away and hide behind the chairs while I was chasing them. We spent a very good time playing that game. After the whole presentation I had a very good sensation, it was a lot of fun and entertaining for the kids and for me. I hope I'll have the opportunity to go there again, make another presentation for more people and dress as a bull again to chase everybody! I also hope that people will like my next tortilla de patatas as much as they liked this one. Thanks to Joana for inviting me to the presentation and thanks to Sylwia for organizing the meeting. See you in the next Spanish Fiesta!
 

- Pedro Pedronka.

The famous BULL