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Recount from volunteering in Portugal: 3. "Portugal, give me more surprises!"

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Hello! It's time for the third, and the last at once, my recount from my staying in Portugal.  "My stay in Portugal is coming to an end. It was going to last eight weeks. Due to various reasons, I have decided to leave Portugal earlier. It also means this is my penultimate blog entry. For summarizing what I have learned here, time will come. Now, I would like to focus on what Portugal surprised me. First, I was surprised that almost everyone has a pet here. My trips’ photos should present monuments. In the end, they show dogs, cats and other different animals, including birds (that is why you can see a pigeon in the picture). That case is very close to my heart, and due to that, I run an NGO in Poland regarded to help animals also that is why I am vegan. An issue that surprised me the most, in this case, was the fact that even homeless animals (unfortunately, there are a lot of them in Portugal) receive some help from people. They gave some food from local people. Of course, I

Recount from volunteering in Portugal: 2. "It’s not always easy."

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Hi!  It's time to share with you my second text written during my staying in Portugal. It has been created after my second week there. "I would say, till now, my typical day in the organization looks very stably. And it is not this kind of work which I love the most. My job appeared totally different before I came to Lisbon within ESC . Usually, I worked on projects. It means I had many deadlines, different kinds of work to do, and it required knowledge from various fields of mine. For you, it can look like unstable work and non-settled working time. And it was. It was also related to a lot of stress, but… I really like it! Maybe not stress, but I feel really well in a job where sometimes there is no time to care about myself, but other times there is very calm, and everything is going slowly. In that case, stress wasn’t so great a sacrifice for me. Especially I really liked that job, and I appreciate I had that opportunity. The job in the organization where I came in within E

Recount from volunteering in Portugal: 1. "Expectations didn’t take me"

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Hi there! Some time ago I shared with you information that I spend some time on voluntary service in Portugal. During that time, one of my tasks was to recount my staying there. Now, I would like to share with you the texts that I created at that time. "I am 23 and come from Poland. My life taught me that I should always have an attitude distanced. My first day here is moving on right now, and I feel it’s an excellent time for the first reflection. The reason why I am here is very prosaic and ordinary. First of all, I felt terrible after one and a half years of sitting at home due to COVID-19. Actually, a year was too much for me. That is why I have decided to apply for an internship in one agency of the United Nations. That is my dream. I am studying business and politics, and a plan to work there is still one of the most essential points in career planning. It turned out there is one problem – they don’t have any time limit to accept or decline an applicant. For an applicant, it

What to do on holidays? Going for Erasmus!

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It’s time for the first substantive content. It will be short. However, the main idea to start blogging was a goal to give you as many tools as a student can get. So, here you go! There is around half of the holidays. Maybe this post should have been published earlier, but most people have plans for the beginning of summer and, probably, you would forget about it. I think it’s the perfect time to give you the inspiration to use the time that we have before the next academic year.   If you don’t have an idea what to do for the rest of the holidays (or you want to do something additional except study), I have a recommendation for you. A lot of NGOs around Europe have received funding for making projects. It is money from the EU, and the main goal for spending is to make short projects for young people within the Erasmus+ programme. Firstly, go to Facebook. Just put various combinations of words such as “young”, “Erasmus”, “opportunity”, “(name of your country)”, “projects”, and others.

Hi there!

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Hello! It's nice to welcome you to my space on the Internet. I thought a lot about one thing that is a common denominator for all things I want to share with you. I found! All are related to my experiences or reflections from cultural exchanges.  How did it actually happen that I take part in them? Well, I wanted to find a way to travel. But not just visiting new places. I wanted to explore culture, meet new people, and live with them. The problem was how to find a way to live a regular life in various places in the world. I could take flights from one place to another and work as a waitress. As a young person, it's quite tough to find a job where you travel a lot... I could try to be happy like that, but I would like to fulfil myself also in the professional area. So I decided cultural exchange might be a great solution. I use it I am still able to do it (most cultural exchanges have an age limit). So, I thought that my experiences might be interesting for someone. The program