Estonia meeting

What can be more beautiful than to travel, explore new places, find out how other people in this world live? With our hearts beating fast and our minds dreaming of the things we would do there, we, a group of nine Romanians (six students and three teachers), set off towards Tallinn, Estonia. Unfortunately, we arrived there a day late, and missed the first activities, as our first flight had been canceled, but that was compensated for by all the fun we had.

We arrived there after midnight, tired, and not knowing anything about that place. After a taxi ride, we got to the school, but where was the dorm? We waited there, fascinated in the meantime by the fact that they had ducks in the schoolyard, until the students that were already there heard us. How nice it was for them to wait for us at such a late hour! We greeted them, hugged them, showed them how excited we were to be there with them. After we unpacked and had a good night sleep, we woke up ready to start our real adventure, for we had a lot to catch up with.

We started our day with a healthy meal at the school cantina, where we saw the other students that lived in the dorm, in the Erasmus project or not, and some of us were even that lucky and happy to meet with our friends and guests that came in Romania. After that we packed our things and went to get the bus that would take us to Aegna Island. When we left the school the weather was quite warm, actually. The sun was shining
and there was just a little bit of wind that, in my opinion, made it better. But we were kind of thrown off when we were waiting for the motor boats, as the wind was very powerful and quite cold. I for one liked the feeling. My cheeks were flushed with the cold, and my lungs were full of the fresh Baltic Sea air.  But others weren’t that lucky. They didn’t dress up very warm and they were scared they would be cold during the activities.

But after an amazing and exciting motor boat ride, we got to the green island, and we were welcomed by warmth, that increased during the day. Later we heard that that day was actually one of the warmest days in Estonia, at least in this year. Lucky us! But let’s see the activities we did there. We were divided into groups and assigned a guide. Then one by one, the group entered the island and discovered its secrets.

 As I said before the island was very green. It was an amazing sight, seeing pine trees so close to sea water. The island was currently uninhabited but we could see marks of old homes that were abandoned. The guide said something very interesting ‘the island’s history is it being abandoned’. We saw after, and even climbed, some old ruins that were a Russian military base. We saw houses that were started but never finished. But the island, as it was, full of trees and wild animals was more beautiful like this. Then we got the the clean, beautiful beach where we played some fun games, that expanded our knowledge about the place, that tested our social skills and that forced us to know each other. Learning by having fun!

We then visited a spiritual place, were some of us performed a ritual to clean our souls.

After more walking through the forest and socializing we got to a little chalet, were we ate and then played another fun game before we returned to the dorm. We had some free time, so we, the Romanian students decided to visit the town and catch up with the activities we had missed. Tallinn is quite similar in some ways, mostly architectural, with Sibiu, but every town has its own story and we were really excited to find out Tallinn’s. Glass statues, panoramas where you see the beauty of Tallinn and the nearby sea, inspirational quotes on walls that are all over Instagram, spots where if you can find five church towers you will be happy for the rest of your life (we only found four): these are only a little part of the beauty Tallinn offers.

Then we met with the others and explored something else: the malls. And of course our main attraction was…chocolate. After we decided to meet in the evening and watch Eurovision, but due to some technical problems we only met a few of the Romanians and Estonians. But the week only had started.

text by Antonia Devian, Erasmus+ team

 9,842 total views,  2 views today

Mircea Cătălișan