As a good starting point, ESN is back with their events. In the beginning of every semester there is a weekend called the Integration weekend which is meant to be the icebreaker for the Erasmus students coming in the city.
Meeting new people isn't always easy. As a matter of fact, I'm actually planning to write about the aspects of what could be the best way to find new friends, so that's on its way. The event started on Friday. The purpose of the weekend isn't really the "where we are" but "the who are we with". It took place in a camping area not so far from Cascais. We shared four bungalows in total, each of the bungalows called a well-known part of Lisbon: Alfama, Bairro Alto and Belém. As we aren't talking about big spaces, we got close to each other from the very beginning. We got our t-shirts and our name tags and started playing some typical icebreaker games to get to know each other a little bit better. One really special event about the opening day was that each participant had to bring a dish to share that is a representative of their country and culture. I decided to make some Palacsinta, since it's a transportable and easy option to make. You could try everything from Italian pasta to the apple strudel of the Czech Republic. After everybody stuffed their belly, it was time for some drinking games, so after quite a short time everybody was extremely laid back. The games ended around 11 pm since the camping area had some rules regarding noise pollution but the people kept playing and having conversations in their bungalows. For me, I was very happy to meet some of the ESN organizator friends again, so I mostly spent that time catching up with them, while some of the other participants were playing Have I never ever and spent the night at the close beach, catching the sunrise. Not everybody was that energetic thou. Some of us caught a well-deserved rest instead.
The next day, we started out at the pool, we spent all of our forenoon there and yours truly didn't pack any sunscreen, forgot to ask if anyone had some and now is struggling to sleep because she turned into a lobster. Please sponsor me with some Aloe Vera gel. After the traditional Portuguese lunch (involving Bacalhao, of course) we played some games again. We started out with some more active and light-headed ones, which were fun and maybe this was the reason we weren't prepared for what was yet to come, We moved on to the Theatre workshop which was all fun and giggles at the start, having warming up and impro exercises but that's when Laura decided to teach us a lesson. A hard one to swallow may I say. They handed a balloon each one of us and told us to blow once every time we list a thing we hate about our life or ourselves. The balloons quickly got full, some of them even exploded, so they got another one. When everybody was done blowing up their balloons, our task was to make them explode them without using our hands. This meant to teach us how our problems can be solved and reflecting on how some of us even helped the others to make theirs explode, we help each other in the real situations just as well because we are not alone. "The only problem we cannot solve is death", said Laura. Some started to cry, it was too much. Too much, in a sense of the people who do not like to confront their fears, mistakes and depths. Sometimes we reach to anything to distract ourselves from them, and these things can either be sources of immediate damages such as alcohol and drug consumption but the inability of settling down and the continuity of chasing foreign countries and stranger friends is still just an escape and not a solution. We finished the workshop with a "relaxation" exercise that I found rather disturbing, but this was a very personal opinion. The exercise was to lay on the ground with our eyes closed. Imagine this: You are in your happy place. You're there and you feel so much happiness. And then you see your goal, something you really want to pursue and you start to run out of the desire to finally get it. You run, you run and you just can't seem to catch it. You fall down a hole, you fall and you fall on the soft sand of the warm beach. You see the endless blue, you start to smile, you found what you were looking for. It's idyllic, it's beautiful. It has to be. The purpose of this exercise was to bring calmness and happiness, but for some reason it failed me. For starters, I could barely chose a happy place. I've lived in so many cities at this point that I can't even point to saying "this one is the one I will call my home" so I ended up in an unknown landscape, but the feeling it brought wasn't happiness. It was an eternal calm. Do we experience happiness differently? Do we all experience happiness in the first place? Then it came the running. Running for a goal. I couldn't think of anything. Okay, I could but running for a better physique (while it's a very logical thing to do in the real life surroundings) sounded silly in this situation. It is a good side goal, for sure, it contributes for health but looking a certain way will never bring you a long term happiness and fulfillment. And there I ran without goals to chase, doing it cause I've been told to. I had a big reflective moment about my life and so did most of the group. "Laura, you broke us", we said with teary eyes. In the end, the hardest paths are the ones worth taking.
This was more of a philosophical thinking process but we are returning to summing up the weekend activities just now.
We went to the beach and saw and amazing sunset. I would even say that the Guincho Beach in Cascais is one of my favorite beaches in Portugal (a list which is coming as well). As you can see from the photos, it's breathtakingly beautiful.
After it got dark we had a game, it was basically a Treasure hunt.
They got clues hidden in the camping area, which was bigger than we imagined, and we had to find them in group of threes. The ESN-ers expected the game to be half an hour long, but it took most of us almost two hours. We stuck around for a beer or two then the night kinda got over because some people were tired, drained down by the sun. The very last day, we all woke up late in the morning, checked out. Half of the group went home and half of the group went to the beach again. Even thou it was cloudy, I managed to get my sunburn to be worse. I'm very talented, people.
I think the planners of the event did a great job so everyone could have a connection with everyone even if some of the people have trouble taking an initiative when it comes to meeting so many people. It was very fun, liberating and all in all in a peaceful surrounding, which matters a lot for the state of mind. I'm pretty positive about meeting these people again here in Lisbon and about making even more memories with them.