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. 


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.
Hoping there are future Peace events!

Adrian Sheremeti

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