SUCCESS, KATYDATA, SPECIAL NUTS, DANDELION, AND ... DONKEYS?

First of all a 10 minutes clapping and a standing ovation for us!!!
Why? Because we are very proud to announce you that we all managed to pass our Greek exam and (as some of us like saying) we conquered the Greek language...or at least the very fist step of it!
We know that the way to the top is still long and difficult, full of grammar perils and vocabulary tricks, but we enjoy the journey more than the view from the top!

It's been more than a week since the classes ended and we miss our classmates, but many other things crossed our path since then. First of all, we did not even have the time to realize that the exam was over, because we left Nicosia right after to discover Katydata.
For those who do not know about the existance of Katydata, it is a very small and very quiet village in the mountains, where the Windcraft Festival took place last weekend. Of course we were there, volunteering in the festival, meeting new people, listening to some concerts (somebody was lucky enough to work in the inside bar and enjoy all the music, somebody just sneaked in when the music was too good to be missed!).
It was amazing seeing this little village come to life, filling with colours, people, music, different sounds and fragrances...especially the aroma of the best felafel ever! (Even just the thought of it makes you feel hungry). Not to mention the warm and generous hospitality of the family we were hosted by, and the special meals they prepared for us. A huge thank for that!
On Sunday the festival was over, but those of us who still did not have enough, ended up in the concert of Thanasis Papakonstantinou in Limpia, positively impressed by this great artist and his music.

After the festival we were tired enough to enjoy a couple of days of pure relax. The second one was kind of special because we went to discover the wonders of Troodos. No hiking this time (after the last experience under the sun of midday, we prefered to leave the hiking for a cooler weather). Anyway, we had a lovely and relaxing tour by car through villages and curvy roads (thanks to the driver who held back his rally-instinct and reduced the speed just for us). We stopped to have a drink, to take a look at some interesting places such as the Kykko monastery, where the girls experienced what it feels like to be dressed as a Harry Potter character!
We also witnessed a kind of a magic, because somehow we managed to have a pic-nic without food, since we did not have the time to go shopping and our fridge was as sad and empty as any fridge could possibly be. But some special nuts made the trick, especially after the huge bagels we had for breakfast.

Adventures go on, and this week we have been in a training which has a lot to do with dandelion. Maybe more magic is coming, too: somebody may turn a donkey into a prince just by kissing him!
But I am not telling you more, if you want to know just wait for next week and you will see...

Ending of the Greek courses and........EXAM!!!!

Everybody was on holiday in Cyprus this week......except for us! Alea iacta est my friends.... This week is the last week of our Greek lessons, and it means that we have an exam.... our first big challenge in the EVS program!

This week passed as fast as the other ones, even faster, as the date of the exam gets closer....so many hours at the University have to be worth a passing grade! If you were to come to our house this week, you would see each of us studying Greek in the living room and going mad with so many papers and things to remember......να μας δώσει ένα διάλειμμα, παρακαλώ!

After our wonderful weekend in Akamas, it was back to reality on Monday to face the last stage of our course. We knew it was going to be a difficult mission, so we decided to find the motivation to do it. What is better than throwing a party with our beloved classmates? Obviously, life is not just studying.....especially in the summertime, right?

It was a great pleasure to host them in our place. We had a lot of fun and we could finally watch the wonderful play that our first teacher, Olessia, prepared for us in our last lesson. It was wonderful to share such a great night with them, and also with our lovely YEU people! About the party......what can we say? Some of us woke up the next morning on a beach, somewhere in Larnaka, anything else?

We also had a dancing lesson with our classmates! It was very fun and interesting, despite it being very hot, and it was amazing to see the professional dancers move their feet so elegantly! Maybe we will become the new Cypriot theatre and dancing stars.....who knows!

Now it's time to say goodbye to the Greek course adventure. They were four wonderful weeks, that, at the beginning we thought it was too much, but as soon as we started and got to know all the people there, we knew that it was a great idea to take the course. Apart from the language knowledge, we take from this course lots of memories, and most importantly, new people and friends who will take part in more episodes of our adventures here on this island.

August is finishing, people will go back to Nicosia and we'll be here ready to offer great workshops and activities.....all the information you need will be on our Facebook page: EVS YEU Cyprus Create your own world II.

https://www.facebook.com/createyourownworldII

We'll be back next week with a very interesting post.....stay tuned!

Exploring the island

Aaand it is August. It's true what they say, when you are having fun, time flies much faster. Except for Greek lessons. No matter how hard you try not to look at the watch, it's always just one minute more than it was when you looked like ten minutes ago. But do not get us wrong, we like our Greek lessons. Some of us may even aspire to be professional Greeks.

Truth is that we spend a lot of our time in the lovely company of Greek language. Not only in the school, but when we come home we just quickly cook something so we can finally do our homework. That takes us about two hours and after the all day with Greek you just cannot say goodbye that easily so we turn on the TV and we watch some series or movies, just to motivate ourselves that maybe one day we will understand what they are talking about.

But when the weekend comes obviously we want to have some time without Greek. So naturally we hang out with our Cypriot friends. Last weekend our mentors took us to Pafos. Finally. We heard so much about it and now we can confirm that it is about 95% true. No matter what you heard about it, it's true.
We were in Petra Tou Romiou, Akamas, Latsi and Polis. Everything was so beautiful. When we were at one of the beaches in Pafos we had the opportunity to board a small boat owned by a nice couple from California. They have spent about 4 months on that boat, just enjoying life and travelling around the world. At least something to look forward to when we retire.

Actually, the main idea for the weekend was camping. It was just for one night, be we still had a good time and we will definitely be back to explore all of the camping possibilities that Cyprus has to offer.

But the biggest fun came on Sunday. First, we had breakfast under a 170 year old tree. The energy of the tree was enormous. Like it knew what is waiting for us... We started with a bath in the Aphrodita baths. And then the walk started. We walked for ages and we still weren't there. We walked for a hundred years and we were bit closer. Then we stopped for one minute to refresh ourselves and then we walked for another thousand years. We saw lots of goats. And then we saw this.






Perfect view, isn't it.

And we walked just for fifty years to swim in the sea down there. Still it was about another five hundred years to get to the place where our cars were parked. We started our journey back, but cars were passing by and that inspired us to just stop one. So we tried. And a car stopped. We saved about one million years, which is the approximate time that it would take us to get there by walking (it doubles when you are really tired). The ride was interesting too. There was a cliff and the road was quite narrow and there were cars going the other way. But we survived. Some of us then had the best sandwich ever, and some of us had quite a good burger.

We would like to mention that all the hiking parts were only Sotiris' ideas, but we are not mad at him at all. He tried his best to kill us but he only made us stronger. And we cannot forget to say that Giorgos knows where all the best sandwiches, food, coffee and ice cream are! But we want to thank both of them for taking such a good care of us and helping us to discover another part of this island.
Oh and speaking about ice cream, almost forgot. Ladies and gentleman, we truly tasted the best ice cream ever.

And one day we will tell you where.

Taking the Highway to our Greek lessons

Kalispera everyone!

   Here we are again :). We hope that you had a great week and that you'll have a even better weekend! ;) So, this has been a very exciting week for us. We were working very hard, gathering ideas, brainstorming, preparing the materials for our first big event... Highway to our world was very busy, lots of traffic at the Home Cafe ;). No kidding, it was great! We had so much fun and we hope that people who where there with us felt the same! Thanks so much to everybody who joined us in this great adventure. But don't worry if you missed it because we will put some photos on our Facebook page so you can catch a glimpse of the atmosphere ;). Next time we want to see all of you there, do we have a deal? :)

Did we tell you that we are attending an intensive course of Greek language? I think we didn't so we will do it now. Our Greek lessons began on Monday and they are really intensive! It's 5 hours per day, 4 weeks in total... Yes, we know that is a lot! We totally agree on that. But we are enjoying it very much. It's interesting, something completely new, especially for some of us who are seeing these amazing Greek letters for the first time in their life! :)

But we are not the only ones who are having small inconvenients with the Greek alphabet and grammar. The people from our language group have them, too :P. We are a colorful mixture of cultures from all around the world. It's just wonderful how we are all different, but in the same time so similar, especially when it comes to conquesting the Greek language ;).

No need to say that we are very thankful to our YEU Cyprus family for giving us the opportunity to learn this beautiful language, thank you guys! <3 We really appreciate all that you are doing for us :). Now all we need is some language practice with native speakers, any volunteers?

That's all for today folks! Stay tuned on our "Tune your souls" and our Facebook and Twitter pages!

P.S. If you have any ideas, you are creative and willing to share your free time with us, please feel free to contact us via Facebook or Email ;)

Anna, Doris, Lenka and Pablo

unCONVENTIONal time

Kalimera to you all!


Last week it was a very unconventional one for us!
In fact, we had the opportunity to be part of the YEU Convention which takes place every year in a different country, and...guess what? This time it is based in Cyprus.
At first, it was difficult to imagine what this "convention" was. To us it sounded just as an empty word, because we didn't know much about it. But then, day after day, that empty word started to fill in with meaning, faces, smiles and much more.

Even though some people arrived during the weekend, most of the participants joined on Monday the 20th and stayed here in Nicosia until Friday morning, when they left to continue their adventure in Pedulas. Four days full of fun and new encounters and who knows what else they are experiencing right know.
We also had the privilege to host some of the participants at our house and even if it was unexpected (especially for a guy who rang our doorbell at 5.30 in the morning) and a little bit crowded (8 people queueing for the shower), it worked well. Unfortunately, we don't have a car and we live quite far from the place of their meeting, which caused them some delays and a little bit of wandering lost in the city.

But back to the convention: what is it and what is it about? Basically, it is a meeting among people who are part of the different YEU organizations in all Europe, to get to know each other, exchange contacts, ideas, projects, but also to discuss a specific topic. This year the chosen topic was youth unemployment, a very important and concrete problem in our current society. Of course, the topic was faced using non formal education with different games and activities, to involve people in a more active way.

On Thursday evening we also invited people from the convention to our radio show "Tune your Souls", and they kindly accepted to participate, answering all of our curious questions and bringing some music from their countries. So if you missed it and you want to know more about the convention, here is the link http://listenagain.mycyradio.eu/index.php?id=5029

Personally, we enjoyed very much finding ourselves surrounded by all this mixture of cultures (from the Balkans to the Iberian peninsula, from Netherland to Cyprus), taking part in this event, (even if just from the outside), feeling part of a huge mechanism which moves thanks to the hard work, the passion, the energy and also the love of pleople who made it possible.

So that is all for today...who knows what else is coming?!
Un grande abbraccio

Anna, Doris, Lenka and Pablo

Adventure starts...

Hello everybody!

We are Lenka, Doris, Anna and Pablo, 4 EVS from Czech Republic, Croatia, Italy and Spain who will spend the next 9 months working with YEU Cyprus.

It has been a week since we arrived to this beautiful island. At the moment we only have thankful words to all the people we have met during these days. We are excited and amazed with everything that might happen to us in the next 9 months!

We are still getting used to our life here, to our beautiful house, our new workplace and, despite it has been only one week, it seems to us that it was a whole month. We did many things such as enjoying a typical taverna in Protaras (thank you Sotiris), enjoying the clean and warm Mediterranean sea, taking a bath in Konnos beach at 1 A.M., discovering the beautiful salt lake and the mosque in Larnaka (thank you Sotiris again, and Giorgos as well =D). We've already learnt how to make a real Cypriot frappé (Giorgos we love you!).

Our first impressions are that people are incredibly friendly and easygoing: you ask for directions and they want to drive you there! No matter if you don't know them too much: whatever you need, whatever you ask for, whatever they think you would like, they always will try to help you!

We've already have our first experience doing our own radio show at CCMC community radio, by the way we have to do some promoting so......TUNE YOUR SOULS, every THURSDAY from 7 to 8 P.M. (Cypriot time). http://www.cypruscommunitymedia.org/
You can also check our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tune-your-soul/505964202888328?ref=hl and our twitter! https://twitter.com/TuneYourSouls

We still can't talk about our future projects and events because we're still working on them, we will let you know! But in advance we can tell you that on the 30th of July we're organizing our first event in Nicosia so you can learn more about us. ;)

And of course we can't finish our first post without thanking Iliana and Yiota and our wonderful mentors: Sotiris, Giorgos, Anthi and Irini for being so nice to us and making our arrival to this wonderful adventure easier!

Stay tuned for next week!

Anna, Doris, Lenka and Pablo