Youth Exchange Blog: "Palette of emotions" in Osijek, Croatia by Ariadna

I decided to participate in this youth exchange in Croatia purely to experience something new and travel during summer vacation. I have not been in Erasmus projects before; however, I have been on similar projects (not led by Erasmus) and had a general idea of how these projects would look like. My expectations were higher than expected. I was under the impression that we would learn something or acquire a new soft skill of sorts. Unfortunately, they seemed to have not been met.

During the project I actively participated in all of the activities, often taking the leading role. While I was not familiar with such a role, I believe that I exercised my ability to lead and organise, which I am grateful for. I believe that I was mainly able to further exercise the skill of communication and leadership in this project.

One thing that could be improved about this exchange is its advertisement (specifically in relation to the infopack). While I believe that it was not created to intentionally mislead people, the lack of information in regards to such a complex topic like art and its presence in this project left many participants (including me) very confused in terms of what to expect from this project exchange. I would personally make the infopack more descriptive. In addition, the exercises could have had more depth to them, as I believe that oftentimes they were rather infantile, considering the target group of this project.

I would personally not recommend this specific exchange to my friends and peers, as it was quite underwhelming; however, I wouldn’t say so about Erasmus youth exchanges overall, as maybe this one just wasn’t for me.

The most memorable activity from this project would be the task we had after the museum trip, which consisted of asking questions related to emotions from each other. We were in groups of 3. These questions were great conversation starters and in general made us discuss some interesting things between each other!