On Monday 13th February, members of our Erasmus+ after school club got ready and prepared for the first transnational project meeting of SOLVE which is a common European project of five schools from Czech Republic, Germany, Italia, Portugal and Spain. The project is coordinated by our Spanish partners from IES José Segrelles in Albaida, and this is also where our initial student meeting was hosted. Travelling to the Spanish town of Albaida we had to fly to the closest city, Valencia.

On our first day, we finally met the pupils from our partnering schools from Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic and of course, Spain, in person. Each of us then spent the rest of the day with our host partner. Looking back we were extremely grateful for the smooth organization by the Spanish teachers, in particular for the fact that we were matched very well with our host students and families.
On Tuesday, the first full day of our meeting, we split into mixed groups and played icebreaker games to get to know each other. After that, we continued to socialize and grow together as a group. Surprisingly and despite different levels of English, we managed to communicate perfectly fine and to exchange ideas for and experiences with the project. Trying to get their visitors accustomed to the local context, the Spanish pupils gave us, the international students, a guided tour of their school. From the outside, the school looks very modern but inside, its design is rather traditional. After the break we resumed the session and turned to the findings from our research, the web quest and questionnaires we had conducted prior to the transnational meeting in weekly afterschool project work at our local schools. The presentation of each school’s findings focused on the current state of youth unemployment and school dropouts in our countries, regions and schools. We were prepared to present the results in a quite innovative PechaKucha presentation, but soon came to realize that a more conventional type of PowerPoint presentation would do the complex realities of the findings more justice (04b_Youth unemployment in Germany erasmus). It was very interesting to learn again how different the situation at each school actually is and how it determines measures, needs and interests to deal with the issue.
Our lunch break was definitely well-deserved. It offered the delicious taste of a traditional Spanish dish, paella. After our meal, our Spanish pupils took us on a guided tour around Albaida. The town is very nice with quite a number of historical sandstone buildings such as the church that we visited, which was very beautiful. Yet some of us German students were surprised to spot a number of rather run down areas.
Later that afternoon the mayor of Albaida welcomed us and suggested that we should go to the doll museum. Admittedly, the dolls were well-made, but still they looked a bit creepy.
Afterwards, the official part was over and we had some free time to spend with our host partners.
The next day, we met at 7am in front of the high school from where we would take a bus to the regional capital of Valencia. Arriving in the city, we first visited the House of (the regional) Parliament for a guided tour through the historical building. We were stunned by its grandeur and thankful for the exclusive tour we were offered. After that we took a break in front of the basilica, which is made of three different architectural styles. In the afternoon we had about three hours to explore Valencia, which we agreed is a beautiful city and definitely a must-see in the region.

On Thursday, February 16th, we got back to work to paint the Erasmus logo on the school’s wall in order to promote and raise awareness to the project at IES Segrelles and to make sure that the project would keep us in good memory. We continued with the so-called country exhibition, which is a fair of traditional and typical products as well as flyers and material presenting the municipalities and regions which are schools come from. Coming full circle to our first day when we started to learn more about our schools and regions as the context for our research, we watched promo videos each school had filmed as a means to advertise SOLVE at their local schools and on social media. Having finished work we spent time in our host families before we met a last time in the evening for our farewell party. There we ate, danced, talked and had fun together ending the project meeting in style.