Gran Canaria

Yuhuuu we visited Gran Canaria, my third island from the 7 Canary Islands. We went again with organized group by AURI the Association where is my EVS project. This time we were 18 people - compact and really friendly group. It wasn’t really funny that we had to wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning so we can catch the boat at 7, but this the way we started our adventure. Well I really can say that it worthed to see the sunrise in the ocean and the playing whales in the water. This was really amazing.

We had a bus that was waiting for us and we followed the already prepared program to visit the most important places on the island as we have only three days. The weather wasn’t in our favor but we spend the whole vacation really nice. Thank you guys for listening my “guide explications” all the time on the microphone :D

The parts that I like the most were the dunas in the South part and Roque Nublo in the mountain. The truth is that each one of the islands here is different and each one has its own charm, but definitely my heart will be always staying here on Tenerife.

9 of May the Day of Europe

9 of day is celebrated as the Day of Europe in all of the countries but unfortunately here on the Canary Islands there was nothing about it. So Zsofi went out with the idea that we can make some event and start the tradition also here. Working together with the other EVS volunteers on Tenerife and the local administration we could do it.

Yesterday we were whole day on the square in front of the town hall with tends with games and specific information for the opportunities in Europe for children, youths, adults and of course one language tend. Unfortunately in this day there was big strike of all of the schools and un and the university so not so many people visited our event , but we hope that it was wrong to start the tradition of celebrating the European day here in La Laguna.

Bulgarian Easter cake

Ok let´s continue with the Easter story. As you know the Catholic and Orthodox Easter are always at least with one week difference, but this year it was whole month. As we were pretty busy last month I tried to make workshop for decorating Easter eggs this week but as everybody here thinks that Easter was one month ago almost no one inscribed so we had to cancel it. It was really pity.

Well I didn't give out and we make a Saturday - a small workshop for Bulgarian traditions :) In the Great Saturday, the day before Easter, as it is the tradition we made a Bulgarian Easter Bred - Kozunak. As it needs a lot of time, work and love to become good one we spend the meanwhile time sharing stories and traditions. I also show them how to make Martenitsas as they wasn't available for other Martenitsas workshop and we painted few eggs with the Bulgarian Technics and make a eggs fight as it is the tradition.

It was one really nice afternoon that I shared with very close for me friends my own culture and keep the tradition of preparing Kozunak for Easter. Thank you Macu, Marie and Jony.

Seville

This weekend I could go to Seville and visit one of my friends who is living there. I met her on the 17th Balkan Youth Festival. Well actually she was one of the PYP volunteers preparing it. So spending 1 month in Bulgaria she welcomed me with the few bulgarian words that she knows. 

We make a really fast but fully seeing of Seville. Just for two days we could visit all of the important touristic places and eat and drink in the really typical places for the sevillians youngsters. Also we made tarator - the bulgarian yogurt soup that my friend was missing so much. This was one weekend that I will never forget.

Well I really love Seville, thank you Mayte for showing me your city.

My friends come to visit me in my paradise

As you already know I had the chance to come and do my EVS in the paradise or with its popular name Tenerife. So when my friends from my spanish course understand this they started to collect money so they can come here to visit me and practice their spanish for a few days.

So they came here after a long and tiring journey and understood how cold it could be on 18 degrees. But they were really happy, it was only one day kind of bad weather and all of the others great. Unfortunately these 6 days passed so fast that we didn't feel them at all.

We could see one small part of my paradise and the greatest thing was that they love it. None of them expected to have so many and different things on such a small island. So much that even I couldn't see all of them since 8 months. All of them were charmed by the Masca. The nature there, as one one of my friends said this is the way she imagine the tropical forests. We also hike up Teide and conquered it. Well I really can't express in this post all of the great moment that we spent here. You can see just part of it from the photos.

I hope that this is just the first of our common adventures.

Tenerife volunteer exchange

The last weekend of march which was the Easter here we make a small exchange with young people form the island who are interested in the volunteering. This experience was really interesting because I discovered new things and new ideas from the people. This is the magnificent thing when you are working with young and different people, that even if you are doing the very same activity with different people it is always different and original.

This weekend we had a great time together talking about volunteering on a local and international level. This is that thing that inspires me to see the young people who really wants to help and something significant for the others. That's why I decided that I will continue working with young people and programs like Youth in Action and inspiring other people to be brave enough to make their dreams come true.

Easter traditions around Europe

Well staying during Easter here and living with people from all over the Europe was really interesting experience. We shared the way everybody are celebrating in home. There is a lot of things that are the same but also a lot interesting differences. For example the painting of easter eggs. The easter bunny and so on. So we just decided to share our diversity and make couple of workshops for painting eggs explaining our traditions as here they are not used to paint eggs at all. We had a lot of fun doing this and also whole week eating eggs.

The really interesting thing for me was that here on Tenerife each family has their own way to celebrate the festival and it is not so generally accepted that it is a family festival like in Bulgaria. They have the tradition to eat fish at Thursday and generally the Holy week is more important than the Easter by itself. And in Bulgaria is the other way around. This was the strange thing for me. But it is really nice that not everyone are staying home and you always have company for going to the beach.