MITTELSEMINAR

Hallohallo.

As I mentioned in my post before, I spent this week (08.-14.03) in Berlin with YFU. There came about 30-40 (?) exchange students from all around Germany who picked that MS. On each day we had some workshops and other activities, the topic for the seminar was sport and nutrition, but the main point was to talk about our year and about our problems and what we´re hoping to achieve during the next 4 months...

At the beginning of the seminar I was really excited and scared and I was just full with emotions and thoughts about what could go wrong etc. But I ended up having the best week of my exchange so far and I met some really amazing people. The whole atmosphere was so good the whole week, and we all got along just perfect ! We stayed up late every night, just hanging in the lobby and talking about our countries and trying to learn each others languages etc, and on the last night all of us got like 2-3h of sleep because well it was the last night... I really want to go back to Berlin and I miss the whole team and every workshop and everything. :((


SUNDAY

 In the morning my hostdad drove me to Jena trainstation, and waited for the train with me. Andrea s.(Spain)  and Marion (Switzerland) were already in the train and I went to sit next them. Johanna (Estonia) was waiting for us in Berlin´s trainstation, and then we still had to find an other Andrea (Spain), and then got together with some other exchange students and took the subways to our youth hostel (?). We were the last ones who made it to our hostel, and we got our rooms right away and then had a little icebreaker game to get to know each other etc. I was in the same room with Kotomi (Japan), Emmelie (Germany, she´s the hostsister from an other swiss girl), Andrea S. and Chiara (Italy). After the icebreaker we had dinner (bread bread and some more bread) and then some other workshops in smaller groups.

MONDAY 

On Monday we had a tour in the Bundestag, wich was really cool ! We also had some time to discover the city and take a loooot of pictures. I partnered up almost every time with Johanna, and we bonded actually reallly good during that week ! We came together to Germany, but in OWO we didn´t really have the time to talk etc. but before the seminar we started chatting and then kind of became really good friends ! She´s just as crazy and weird as I am so we´re a freaky match :D And she also comes from Tartu, woopwoop! Anyway back to Monday... In the evening we had an other workshop and the rest of the time we were all together and getting to know each other.

TUESDAY

On Tuesday the Teamers (Teamer =  a YFU volunteer) did a little city rally for us, and we had to team up in to groups of 3-7, and in our team was Johanna (surprise surprise), Emmelie, Veronika (Czech republik, and she´s the gueststudent from Emmelie), Elena (China), Kotomi, Johnson (China) and me. We got a sheet of paper and had to find the answers to each guestion, and we got an apple wich we had to exchange as many times as possible, and the team who ended up with the most expensive item won that part (or just got the best points). We ended up spending 2hours on the challenge and then we still had 2+ hours for shopping, and we decided to go to Primark. I was panicking a bit in Primark, since I had never been there before and there were so many people and I just grabbed whatever was cute and thought ´yeah I´ll try everything on and then pick the nicest items´ yeah well I didn´t really know Primark had the limit of 8 items that you can take to the dressing rooms and hello here´s alina with 20+ items... Haha god, well I ended up trying only a few items from wich I liked only 3 and then bought a pair of jeans and a shirt without trying them on.

WEDNESDAY

On Wednesday we were divided in to groups and each group visited a museum of their choice, and our group visited the Berlin Wall museum. It was really interesting, and we saw the  pieces of wall in its original place, and the danger zones etc. There was also a little wall of pictures of people who died near the wall, with their names and dates. We also walked a bit around to see the ruins of the wall and pictures of what the same place used to look like years ago, and hear stories of what happened in that exact place etcetc...

THURSDAY

On Thursday we visited a farm and learned about  healthy eating and where our food comes from, and why is it important to pay attention to what type of product you´re buying etc. Later we all got to choose what kind of sport we would like to do and we could choose from a) swimming b) ice skating c) hiphop d) volleyball or e) an Olympic winner presented some kind of a speech (?) about sport and stuff; and he was also an exchange student before!! Anyway I picked swimming and after lunch we walked to the swimming pool and swam and had fun. I was alone with our Teamer Elena with 6 boys: Patrick (Romania), Konstantin (China), Nut (Thailand), First (Thailand), Pablo (Mexico) and Murad (Azerbaijan). Some coach was also there at the same time, and when I went to drink he started talking to me and told me that if I´ll move to Berlin then I can come to their swimming club, hah he was really nice and he also let me borrow their equipment. In the end we jumped from the 3m plank, and the coach taught me how to jump the start-jump(???) from 3m. Then the boys wanted to learn the jump from the normal hight, and we started teaching them with the coach. They all learned it pretty well, except for Konstantin, who only managed to jump 10+ times on his belly and hurt himself :D:D:D:D In the evening we went to a youth disco, wich was full with 12-14 year old know-it-alls...

FRIDAY

On Friday we had to plan our own evening programme, and we decided to do like a little ´challenge´for the Teamers, where they had to gather points from our challenges. First we presented our presentation from Estonia with Johanna, and then we asked them some questions. Then the chinese students presented their presentation and the students from Thailand did a little presentation about their language, and Thai sounds so funny :D:D they have like the same type of pronunciation but they´re still different letters (???) :D:D We also asked them some normal questions about our museum-presentation (wich we presented on Wednesday) and in the end they had a little ´taste-game´ where we gave them some disgusting foods/drinks and they had to guess what it was. We finished the ´challenge´somewhere around 23-00 and then we just stayed in the lobby and chilled a few hours.

SATURDAY

In the morning we had to bring our bags before breakfast already downstairs and after breakfast we still had a little game where we all got papers on our backs and we had to walk around the room and write some positive thoughts about each other. After that we all headed together to the main trainstation of Berlin, and with the ones who´s train´s left later we did a few energisers in the middle of the station. For those who don´t know what an energisers are, they´re little ´games´ (dancing, singing, and jumping around like a little kid) that we do in every YFU meeting. :):)

Spain - Estonia - Switzerland

TEAM TARTU

Romania - China - Estonia x2

South Africa

Finland

ESTONIA 

one love

the metal things are the area where the Berlin Wall was

and the wall

the wall with the dead people

enough said

Primark !

Estonia - Spain - Estonia

China - Estonia x2

Italy - Estonia - Finland - Estonia - Spain - Mexico - Chile

Finland - Spain x2 - Mexico - Estonia- Germany - China - Norway- Estonia- China x2

Estonia - China - Thailand

Romania - Estonia - Serbia 

Italy

Estonia - Mexico - Spain

our cute Romanian before...

... and after

piudipii

Norway

mi mexicano

Romania- Estonia - Slovakia - Mexico

we literally thought 283675 times that Albert was a girl....

Thailand x2

Germany

Thaithai

that language is weird

The best MS group ever ! <3

I´m not really sure do I have the right information under the right days or whether I did a lot of mistakes but I hope I still managed to give you guys a good summary of how awesome my week was, :):) I only wish MS would´ve lasted longer, and I´m so jealous of those whos is still coming up - ENJOY IT ! And once again thank you to all of you who were a part of that seminar, love you all ! <3

Tschüß !