Final Stop... Budapest
Budapest, the name of a city that I heard a lot about but knew very little. This was to become the next destination and the last stop for the Peace Work Institute for me.
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Adrian (top left) with other Peace Institute Participants |
Like every other training that we attend, this one also had
the well known challenge for the young people of Kosovo... going through the visa
process. Something I had done in the past but still a really stressing process, anyway I got the visa and was really excited about going to Hungary.
6am on the 8th of February, I was supposed to be
on the way to meeting my colleagues but instead I was sleeping! For some reason I missed my alarm clock and if I
wouldn’t have got a call or two from Dorina, I would most certainly missed that taxi... 30 minutes late but i made it!
We got to the airport of Pristine, as always waiting in an
airport without free Wi-Fi it is boring and it feels like an eternity that was in really a long hour. After 6 hours of waiting in another airport
at Istanbul no free Wi-Fi there also but I was lucky enough to find someone who
had access to the Wi-Fi and I used it for a couple of hours, flight time came,
I guess it was from excitement but that flight felt like a short one and there
we were in Budapest, as you can see instead of having a 30 minute flight from Pristine to Budapest we had to go from Pristine to Istanbul then to Budapest... a 12 hour journey.
The European Youth Center in Budapest was a really cool and
a well organized youth friendly building, with an amazing view of the
city.
The view from the Youth Centre |
Meeting old friends was an amazing feeling, we had a few
new faces to the group but we became friends really fast. Each time we had to work in our tandems (Balkans, Turkey/Armenia, Russia/Georgia/Ukraine and Karabakh), we ended up being a huge group full of different people, each one of them with
their own mindset. We were 15 people in the Balkans group which included Ireland & N.Ireland but we all knew each other and
had spent time together in Kosovo so it was a bit easier.
Home groups as they were called were one of the things I
have enjoyed the most not only this time but throughout the whole RfR experience. Having
the possibility to tell how you feel during the events has been a really good expereince.
An amazing week a lot of cool stuff, new things, most of the
week was about the evaluation of Roots for Reconciliation project, it was a
really busy schedule and a lot of work had to be done, things were a little bit
easier since we already knew each other and we had a better understanding of
each others context and past conflict
.
In the middle of the week we had a free afternoon, that
meant we had some exploring to do, some people went to the mall some others to
the old part of the city, for my good luck I was with the group of people that
did both of them. It took a really big effort from me to do all that walking in
a day but it was worth it. We saw a lot of cool things, visited the Castle of
Budapest and after all that we ended up in a Italian restaurant.
After an amazing experience I left that place wondering if
there will be another Roots event? Knowing the fact that this was a really good
experience for me personally and I would like to hear that also other young people from Kosovo will have a chance to experience this type of activity and to personally develop.
That’s pretty much my week in the amazing city of Budapest, a
good, nice but also a quiet city that has a lot to discover.
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Hoping there are future Peace events! |
Adrian Sheremeti
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