Week 3 Activities and Special guests

Intro

During the 3rd week in Elazig for my 7 months Erasmus internship, things were starting to go better day by day. More Erasmus students were coming and more activities were coming up.

Due to the fact that Earth Day was coming up during this week the Erasmus office thought that if we gather all the Erasmus students and also some outgoing Turkish students we can make a great team and take a day off and clean the campus. Even though i was not quite excited about this plan i mean who is anxious to stay in the sun all day and pick up trash right! but i was on board and i saw everybody else excited.

So this post i will show you guys some pictures from that day and also another activity we did during the 3rd week was to welcome our new students from Ghana with a great Romanian breakfast and some traditional dishes from Ghana cooked by them of course.

Cleaning the campus

If i remember good i think that Earth day this year was in the beginning of May so our staff in the Erasmus office made a nice brochure and we went in the campus and stick it and spread it on every tree and door. What i taught it was hilarious was the fact that we only had limited number of empty places for those who wants to sign up for picking up the trash and there was also conditions, for example only if you are about to go with Erasmus you are eligible to sign up and i guess there were only 20 places empty.

I mean come on who wants to pick up the garbage with so enthusiasm who knew you may not be eligible for it. Guess what nobody came to sign up for this only in the last day 2 students came so now we had our 8 Erasmus students which was us incoming and 2 outgoing plus the staff from the office.

In order to attract more students the coordinator promised us that after we finish collecting the trash we will have a great lunch together, so i guess this was the cherry on the cake that on the actual day Friday a bunch of Turkish students showed up, funny as hell by the way.

So yeah it was Friday and we all met in front of the Erasmus office prepared to sweat and smell like garbage but very important fact that we were all equipped with special gloves and garbage bags if it was like a new trend or something!

The picture kind off sucks but you can make an idea, yeah that's me with the ripped jeans, some of the staff and some of the students but we were just a few here, total around 25 or more so it was a success.

By the way my gloves were a xxl size so yeah. Because we were so many we split in 5 teams of 5, in my team i choose just Turkish students because i taught if they don't speak English would be perfect, less conversation and more work done. For sure it was not the case by any means, we started talking somehow and taking selfies and pictures and we forgot about cleaning the campus and we were like on a long walk in a summer day. Of course all my cleaning was mostly fake, i may collected one or two empty chips bags and that was all, i hated this activity.

With an empty bag but i put on my special trash picking outfit plus my brand new Asics sneakers so that means something! Also as you can see how big my gloves were.

My trash partner Mustafa and Oana a Romanian student. Less cleaning more pictures!

Oana and her husband Marius, they were actually in the other team so their duty was completed better. I guess that after seeing everybody's bag full i realized my team it was the worst, we barely collected a quarter of the bag.

The campus was clean before actually so it's not like we had to pick up all the trash and come on this is a big campus, second in Turkey as size so you can imagine 3 hours would not be enough for that. But it was all worth it after, we got to have a great lunch with Turkish lahmacun which for those who don't know is a traditional Turkish specialty of a lookalike pizza with very small pieces of beef on top.

Earth Day was completed! For more pictures go into Firat University facebook page as well. All the pictures made by me from my phone!

Traditional Romanian and Ghana breakfast

Moving on, as i told you this 3rd week a bunch of medical students from Ghana came to Firat University, i guess they were 8 total, 2 girls and the rest all boys. They were all accommodated in our block of apartments so we got a chance to met them all and we had an idea in order to get to know each other better why not organize a Saturday morning breakfast with both Romanian and Ghana traditional dishes.

Said and done Friday afternoon we all met and went to Carrefour to make some shopping for the next day. Me and my fellow Romanian girls we bought things we taught will be easy to cook and show exactly the best of Romanian cuisine. We were around 12 or more so a lot of groceries were made. In this breakfast we were 5 students from Romania, 1 from Poland, my boyfriend Muhammet who's Turkish and the rest of them from Ghana and i hope i don't forget anybody.

So Saturday morning came and we all met in my apartment and Oana's flat which was one floor down and start cooking. On one hand we Romanians started to prepare our traditional dishes and the Ghana boys they started making their. Now i was so skeptical and we were all questioning what they will cook because on their shopping day they bought some things they didn't quite match, like fish and tomato sauce and flour and i don't know but we were so curious.

Time came to met all in another Erasmus apartment and start to learn about each others dish and get the conversation going.

We decided to eat on the floor Arabic style just because we were so many and there were not enough chairs and also the table was quite small. We started to bring one by one the dishes and gather all around so curious.

Me and my Romanian friends cooked a bunch of things like Romanian pancakes with jam inside, eggplant salad which you eat it on the bread, Boeuf salad which is basically a salad with vegetables, pickles and a lot of mayonnaise and egg bread. The Ghana boys prepared a fish chicken soup, beans with rice and something sweet like meatballs which you had to eat with beans and a sauce they made, strange right?!

We started to present our dishes and also them he was showing us which one goes with what and how to eat it.

From left to right : Ibrahim from Ghana, Marius and Oana from Romania married couple, Georgiana she was Erasmus staff, now she quite, also Romanian and Iacob from Poland.

Muhammet my boyfriend from Turkey and sorry i don't recall his name, showing him the traditional dish.

The food overall was great, ours ( i am laughing now literally ) i have tried a bit their food but i am so sorry so say it was strange and i don't know, for example the fish chicken soup, they literally throw everything inside there fish with bones and all plus the chicken combination was bad. Also Muhammet shared the same feeling as me. Other dish the beans with the rice and sweet meatballs combination oh my God it was worse than the soup, plus a thing i don't like is eating with the hands which i found out was something you do in Ghana. But i appreciate the experience!

One bad picture with me but at least you can see all the dishes almost, the fish soup was actually not there unfortunately. As a reminder for me next time not to join this type of breakfasts anymore only if i am sure the food will be better.

I am not trying to be a bad person or any way but i know what i like and what i don't and when is food involved i am extremely picky and i do not eat and like a bunch of foods. I guess my mom raised me in a spoiled way so maybe that's why i am like that.

All in all as i said it was a great week with plenty of nice or not activities and at the end of the day i do appreciate the experience bottom line. And a thumbs up to my friends from Ghana who were nice persons and i was gladly to share this experience with them .

Photo gallery