On a beautiful summer day in Estonia my friend told me about the Erasmus+ project in Turkey, Trabzon. After some research and filling in the documents I was selected as participant of this project. Last days of July went fast looking for cheap flight tickets, and then arrived the long awaited day and all the Estonian team met up at Tallinn Airport and we started our trip to Turkey.
As our tickets were bought in different days we could not fly all together from the starting point to Trabzon. There were some complications with finding each other in Trabzon Airport, but we finally we arrived to our accommodation place and as we were first arrivals we had the best opportunities to choose rooms. In the next morning arrived other participants. In my case my roommates were four amazing girls from Armenia.
The first day we started getting known to each other through some games and energizers. The second day we started with actual topic of this project which was pretty interesting for me, especially because of the participating countries. Every day, one of the participating countries organized four activities about the topic given to them. The Turkish team was the first one and in my opinion also one of the most organized ones. We were almost the last ones with our sessions.
During the night time each country organized cultural night about their country and traditions. I liked the cultural nights the most because I actually started to understand more about these countries and I felt that I can understand a little bit more about these people and their surroundings. Also I learned a lot about historical and actual problems in these countries and prejudices that they have about us and others. I have to mention that in my opinion the selection of participating countries was interesting because all other participants were neighbor countries excluding Estonia (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan). These countries are not that well known here, that’s why I feel really lucky to have friends from these countries now.
Also, we had a lot of free time to go to the beach or chill in the balcony. We walked in our village and city center of Beşikdüzü. There were some really incredible places. Even better, during this project we had two excursion days. The first of these trips took place to Ordu. There we had an interesting city game in which we had to complete tasks which consisted in talking with locals and taking photos and videos about it. In the beginning it was hard but eventually it turned out as a great activity. After completing the task we had free time.
The second trip took us to Trabzon. There we visited local mosque and The Atatürk house. After these attractions we had free time to shop and visit the city by ourselves.
I really liked the place where the project took place. The climate was so perfect, it was hard to come back to Estonia. Shokkin home was also really cozy place. And the last, but not less important good aspect was the local food. I think it was very delicious.
All in all I am really satisfied with the experience. I would like to take part more in projects like this and I also would recommend it to others.
Silvia Linnuste
Shokkin Group Estonian team