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“Condensed seasons”
These two months were very condensed. Full of work, encounters, emotions and new experiences. Tiring, but extremely enlightening, beautiful and unexpected : some of the things that I look for in my life. The two seasons that passed -autumn and winter- had an important impact on my senses : the colour and the smell of the falling leaves, the cold and dry wind that wakes your cheeks up. The autumn, gave us -with Aire, Julia and Csenge- the wish to build a big autumn tree with real falling leaves that children could glue on a long piece of carboard. For kindergarden’s children, the shape of their hand that they can paint in brown on a piece of paper would make a nice tree’s trunk. With paints on the end of one finger, they can add leaves everwhere around the “hand-trunk”.
So we did these two activities in school. One was more difficult that we imagined and I had this reflexion that we should always present an example to the children so they can know what kind of result we would like to have with them. In the kindergarden, the activitie provoked joy and pleasure, just as for us as the little ones. Seeing their spontaneous reactions -that children always have- was for me a present. Talking about present, we made christmas activities : we created penguins, christmas tree and a santa claus’s sledge with raindeers only with egg’s boxes, including again recycling matter in our project. We also created a new puppet show from a french children tale called “Cornebidouille”that we translated in hungarian : a frightening witch comes to see Peter in his bedroom -a little boy who doesn’t want to eat his soup every dinner- to scare him in order to convince him to eat it. The big witch puppet that we made, we were proud of it, oh yes. We made her a long-hooked-red nose, green hair -from a ball of wool- and scary yellow eyes -with two caps from glass bottles-. The children loved her. She was from here, the tallest puppet that we created. And she had a superpower : she can eat clouds and blanket with her mouth -that we did from the top of a plastic bottle-.
Then christmas holidays came. I needed to move in an other place, meet new people, feel an other atmosphere, travel in a different way and put in practice my whish to experiment hitchhiking. I decided to go for a road-trip in whole Hungary during almost two weeks with a french friend. Our main goal was to hitchhike from a city to an other until arriving in Vienna -in Austria- to celebrate the New Year Eve there with two other french friends. With Csenge’s advices, an hungarian volunteer and friend who works in the same project, we created an itinerary. She warned me that hitchhiking in Hungary would maybe be difficult : in this country it is not comon, not a random thing. But my intuition was good and I was certain that if I believe in it, if I do it with confidence instead of fear, if I feel a loving energy, so life will return the favour to me. And that’s exactly what happened. We joined us with Mélie, my french friend, in Szeged. From here, only by hitchhiking, we went to Budapest, Szentendre, then Veszprém, Tihany, Györ, Sopron and Vienna. No need to tell how unexpected and incredible was the experience to hitchhike and talk with the persons who stopped. Some of them couldn’t speak english but moving our arms, talking with our expressions’s face and giving love was enough to make us understand and to share some stories. One day, we were visiting Veszprém, we didn’t know where we could sleep the nigth : our Couchsurfing’s requests didn’t have any answer or negative ones, my hungarian friends from the project didn’t have any contatc in this city, no opened hostels or hostels at all -we were the 26th of December- and too expensive hotels. So we put a piece of paper on our backpacks, written on it “We don’t have a place to sleep tonigth, could you welcome us? Kérem” and visited the beautiful city until the sunset. Nobody, no propositions from anyone. Ready to sleep in the trainstation or in some places outside protected from the wind -we had very warm clothes and sleeping bags-. We had a tea in a restaurant and then a hungarian family noticed our paper on our bags. They offered us to spend one nigth in their secondary home, half an hour away from Veszprém and next to the Balaton lake. Our travel looked like this last anecdote. I can just one thing, that I am grateful.
