This January I spent almost two weeks in England, most of the time in Tynemouth. I discovered this beautiful town with amazing beaches, perfect for nature-lovers. 

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst” (William Penn). 

Today we say this so often. But did you notice what are the things for which we cannot find time? Usually for what makes us happy. We don’t have time for our family, we don’t have time to read, to exercise, to travel, we don’t have time for our hobbies, for our passions, for our dreams. Is this normal? If we only live once, shouldn’t we live doing whatever makes us happy and laugh until our belly hurts, whatever makes us falling asleep with a smile on our face, whatever makes us feel loved, proud, accomplished, alive?

In November 2014 I had the opportunity to bring a change and a touch of happiness in some persons’ lives through an action in Lisbon aimed to raise awareness about this issue. I was in Portugal as a participant in an Youth Exchange about social problems and design-based social activism campaigns. At the end of this exchange we, the participants, organised the action I mentioned above and we named it “Take your Time”.

With this action we wanted to remind people that we should invest our time wisely, thus we should work to change our bad habits and invest more of our time in the things that make us or people that we care about happier.

The event took part in the center of Lisbon - at Praça do Comércio – and we tried our best to offer people a complete experience – to make them realise that it is important to make time for those things that bring happiness into their lives, to make them remember what are those things that truly matter for them and, finally, to help them find solutions in order to make time for those activities.

At the beginning of their experience, people who joined the action were invited to write on a poster the things that they would like to do, but don’t have time for. Then they received a small bottle and a paper to do the same. After that they were invited to walk through our installation where they found posters with suggested solutions of how one can solve the problem of time and manage to do those things he/she would like to do.

"Take your Time" beautiful organising team

Watch this for a better understanding of “Take your time” event.

In September I participated in an youth exchange project and I spent two weeks in Hungary together with other 28 participants from Romania, Ukraine and Georgia. The project was called "Be entrepreneur" and the purpose of it was the exchange of experience and knowledge among young people from the participating countries interested in entrepreneurship. I liked the fact that among the participants were also young entrepreneurs, including from Romania, which were open to share with us their experiences, give us advices and encourage us to put our ideas into practice.

The project was held in Vásárosnamény, a city in eastern Hungary I didn’t hear about before and whose name we didn’t know how to pronounce. Therefore, on the road it was really funny how we were replacing the name of the city with "there", "in that town", “at the destination" etc.

We were 10 participants from Romania and together we formed a beautiful and united team with whom I felt great during the project. It was a nice feeling of friendship ever since the first time we met, and during the project we were like a little family – everybody kept asking us if we knew each other before the project and were surprised to find out that we met for the first time just before it.

I had the pleasure to meet smart, friendly and talented young people with whom I spent the most fun and interesting two weeks in a long time. I still keep in touch with some of them and I hope that we will see each other soon, maybe in another project, discovering together another country in Europe.

I miss so much this experience, but who wouldn’t? I felt so good and free. We had a large yard with green grass and the weather was great, thus we did most of the activities outside. During the project we had bikes available and the organizers encouraged us to ride them as much as we could and discover the surroundings - one of the aims of the project was also promoting of the area.

Every day we were playing the guitar and listening to many beautiful songs from Ukraine and Georgia. To our surprise, the Ukrainians already knew how to play Andrii Popa (a Romanian song)  and we were so happy to listen to it and to sing along. Of course, I took advantage of the opportunity and took some guitar lessons for the first time. In the category "what new things I learned" are also included the Ukrainian and Georgian "lessons" that I took (and, of course, in return I also taught them some Romanian words). 

During the project I had the opportunity to visit some areas in Hungary; besides  Vásárosnamény, I visited Debrecen,  Nyíregyháza, Tokaj and  Erdőbénye.

Erdőbénye I liked the most, where we visited a local wine business and after that some tasty traditional food and wine tasting were prepared for us. The atmosphere was so special, the food delicious and the wine really good.

In the agenda were also included intercultural nights. There were presentations about the culture and customs of each country, we tasted traditional food and drinks and learned traditional dances. During the Hungarian evening, besides the traditional food that was prepared for us, we also had the great surprise to learn some specific dances from two professional dancers. 

How we had fun_YIA Project in Hungary from Katia ModaKvoda Vodopianova on Vimeo.

"Be entrepreneur" project was organised by Ajak Ifjúságáért Közhasznú Közalapítvány and was funded by the European Commission. I attended this project through GEYC. I highly recommend you to take advantage of such projects because they are a very nice experience and they help you develop in many ways. You have the opportunity to travel, to interact with other cultures and with different young people from Europe with common interests, practice English, practice other languages, benefit of training on the project’s topic, you develop your love for your country and you have fun! Oh, and all this is almost free. I encourage you to take advantage of them and believe me, once you go to such a project you will not be able to wait until the next one!