Dear exchange diary,

life’s currents have taken the ship I am on to new shores, and here I am giving you the exclusive sailor’s report.

Initially, what happened after our glorious concert crusade was me embracing the toil to go to Vienna for the sake of an AFS school-visit concept workshop. There us aka 10 random volunteers from all around Austria who had enough intrinsic motivation to attend the whole thing was taught a new way of doing AFS school-visits (which normally rather seldom occur). The original problem used to be that schools often would not agree to having a bunch of volunteers over for the sake of it solely being advertisement. So what the genius AFS Austria bureau came up with was to offer the schools a workshop about intercultural learning in exchange for being able to advertise our organisation. Essentially, we spent half of the afternoon playing through the visualised intercultural learning workshop, which turned out to be quite interesting stuff. Can’t wait to put this sweet piece into practice!

Weeks passed and soon after another exciting weekend found its way into my life. It was the weekend throughout which two girls, one from Argentina & one from Bosnia, were to visit us. After they had been guided through Salzburg’s old town by the Norwegian-Austrian duo on the day of their arrival, we built a bridge to the notorious concert crusade — a small but rather groovy concert by Austrian singer-songwriter Clara Luzia. Next day, we met up with a couple more of exchange students from all corners of the world-map and then took about three buses to reach Hallstatt. Over there we did but have a good ol’ time. Whilst ending up having seen almost nothing of the city, we crashed thousands of tourist photos and even made our very own dance flashmob. Kool & The Gang would be proud of us.

Time went by again and a big, sparkling day or rather weekend was to come and enter the tundra (which represents my everyday life): my first ever experience as a volunteer on an AFS camp. A special one on top, namely AFS Austria’s yearly APFP camp, in which — as I very likely have already previously mentioned — current international and future national exchange students come together and celebrate intercultural learning. To close the gap to my personal experience there: Especially at first, I felt very much like in a small time-machine as I got thrown back into my old self’s skin for a bit. That wasn’t necessarily all negative though as I therefore had another opportunity to dive into my self-image a bit. Plus, next to that adventure occurring in my self, the camp was one hell of one in its own right. It all took place next to the Wolfgangsee, a picturesque lake located in the surroundings of Salzburg. I was supposed to take care of a small group of exchange students together with an experienced volunteer hence privileged to focus on learning how to handle such a group through observation. My camp highlight was a cringeworthy, lyrically medieval poem about world-citizenship a fellow volunteer and I wrote after enjoying some good ol’ siesta. It all reminded me a bit of an inverted version of my very own APFP camp back as one of the AP people; in the end, the three days went by like a daydream and on Monday it was already time again to say goodbye (potentially forever) to many of the amazing folks I had met.

Make your day a memorable one and celebrate your world-citizenship!

Julian

30/05/18