Ralf Bureck

Achim, Germany

Young People - European Futures

2013

My Comenius experiences - Ralf Bureck ( Achim, Germany )

I participated in the Comenius trip to Tampere, Finland. We arrived there in the early afternoon of January the 16th. The first thing I realized at the airport was that I had underestimated the coldness. In the plane, we had already seen lots of snow, but I suppose nobody of us expected it to be that cold. Anyway, at the airport we all were a bit nervous because we'd meet our guests for the first time and we completely didn't know what was waiting for us.

When they finally came to pick us up, we recognized they were nice and probably just as nervous as we were. We got a drive from Eeva's dad and my host Pauliina and I were dropped off first. I said goodbye to the other Germans and we went into her house, which is one of the greatest I've ever seen.

Pauliina showed me around the house, and then we ate something because I hadn't eaten anything but my breakfast about 6 hours before. After that, we went to the stable to visit Pauliina's horse, which seemed very nice although I have completely no idea about horses.

It soon got cold and dark, so we went back to the house, where I first met Pauliina's family. They were all very nice, which made my stay very casual. When I went to bed, I really looked forward to what was coming the next day and maybe even more to see the Germans again.

Next day, we went up early and took the bus to Tampere. Pauliina lives in Pirkkala, which is quite a lot of kilometres away from Tampere, so the journey took us about one hour.When we got into the school, we met all the comenius people.

In the beginning, we mainly stood around with the people from our country to talk about the things happened after we said goodbye yesterday. But soon, the atmosphere got better, and then we just went to the other people, said hello and just talked about where we came from and what were our hobbies and so on.

Then, the teachers came and we got some programme including welcome, introduction to Finnish history, the Finnish education system and the school itself.

After that, we were separated into small groups and went to discovered Tampere. Pauliina and some other Finns persuaded us to eat some weird-looking sausage. As soon as we knew what was in it, we stopped eating and went back to the school, were some ,introduction games' had been organized, which meant stupid and embarassing dancing and so on.

In the evening, when we all went back home, I was quite happy cause I had already made friends with Sam, an English guy playing basketball just as me, and some other people.

In the following two days, we visited a school for lumberjacks, swam in a frozen lake, went shopping, visited two museums and played lasertech, but I really can't remember what was on which day, except that we had a party at saturday evening. After that, we had to say goodbye to all the nice people we got to know, which was really sad.

On sunday, Pauliina and I met with Julian and Maria and their hosts. We went shopping again, and after that we played lastertech once again with a few more people.

Finally, on monday, we flew back home, which was once again sad. We said goodbye to all the friends we made and at least I didn't wamt to go back home to my boring school.

As you can see, I made very much amazing experiences with Comenius, and now I can say that I have friends all over europe. I really enjoyed my visit in Finland, and I only can advise it to everyone who is interested.

Ralf Bureck

Achim, Germany