22/09/2024
Spain
participants
To improve engagement between international students, for them to get to know a new area of Cantabria, and finally, for the attendees to understand better what is ESN and who are the volunteers.
A hostel with enough spots for all the international students and volunteers is rented in Cóbreces (Cantabria). We use a private bus to take us to Cóbreces, arriving to the hostel at 19:30h on Friday. The first day, upon arrival, some leisure activities were prepared so that the international students could get to know each other better. After that, dinner was served on the hostel. Afterwards, a party was prepared with leisure proposes but also to provoke new interactions between the students separating them from their friends. It was done in a space inside the compound with the approval of the owner.
The second day we started with breakfast in the hostel and afterwards we went to the Cobreces Beach, to play some Beach Games. We had the materials in our ESN office so that wasn’t hard. We had two basketball nets, footballs, frisbees, rackets, petanque, spikeball… It was a really fun activity for the international students. At around 13h, we went back to the hostel for lunch. In the afternoon, at 16h, we did a hiking route in the area, to the “Bolao” cliffs. This route had been prepared by a staff member that already knew the way. Most of the participants went hiking. It started to slightly rain at the beginning of the hike, being this rain stronger after reaching the cliffs so it was decided to come back to the hostel at that moment in order to avoid possible accidents. After the hiking, everyone had time to prepare for the party in Caramelo, in Oyambre. The bus picked us up on the hostel and took us there. In Caramelo we had paella for diner and after there was a party until 3am, when the buses came back to take us back to the hostel.
The dynamic of the last morning, Sunday after breakfast, was with envelopes where each person that was on the event had an envelope with their name on it. Post-it notes were prepared for everyone so they could put notes for each other inside the envelopes. There was also one envelope for each volunteer and one for ESN Santander in general. While we were doing the activity, we were all cleaning the rooms and the luggage. The buses came for us at 13h30 and took us to Santander.
