The trip to paradise - Part V (The Tea Room)

Yet another post about my Lithuania trip.
The whole thing was so enriching an experience that one could probably write a book about it. I'm not very good at writing books so I'm posting snippets on my blog :)

I talked before about the youth exchange project's theme "Let's meet for a cup of tea or coffee"

So naturally, one of our main activities (and one of the most fun) was to host a "EuroMed" tea room in a big square in the city Panevėžys where each day one or two countries would serve their national tea and coffee to the lithuanian locals.

Our hosts provided an easy to set up tent to serve as the tea room and on our second day we had an hour or so in our schedule for brainstorming for ideas. We were randomly split to groups, and each group would try to come up with as much ideas as they possibly could. Write them all down. And then all groups met, all ideas were collected and explained and then votes taken so as to which ideas to implement (bearing in mind the feasibility too).
One of the excellent things was that the leaders didn't meet in a closed room to decide what we'll do. It's our tea room, so everybody put in efforts to make it as successful as possible.

Votes were taken and decisions were made, we were then split to groups based on preference as to what ideas you would like to implement. We'd made 6 "Welcome" signs in 6 different languages (those of the participants), we've decided we'd get colored chalk and draw arrows and feet outlines from every direction of the square leading to our tea room, so as to attract people. We had national music of the current tea room country playing. We made various origami decorations with colored paper and attached them to a string to hang in the tea room (Rasa taught us how to make amazing birds from a piece of paper). We made lots of small flags for all the 6 countries which were to be hanged too and we even created the closest thing we could to a big cup out of carton.

And it's pretty amazing what 30 enthusiastic minds (and hands) could create in a couple of hours. Photos will show at the end of this post.

So almost everyday we'd go to the city, set up our tent, and one or two countries would be ready with various flavors of their national tea and coffee. We'd serve to the locals and have the occasional chat with them about whether they like it, where we're from, what they know about our countries...
The Lithuanian people are amazingly warm and friendly, they'd come, chat with us, tell us how much they want to visit our countries, and some of them even became regulars and would pop up everyday to see what's "new" in our tea room. It was just so much fun and yet a very enriching experience, just like every activity we had.

Next time I think I would like to talk about the inter-cultural nights, another major activity but one that is common between all youth exchange projects wherever they are hosted and whatever the topic was.

For now I'll leave the photos to do the rest of the talking and help you visualize the whole thing.

Hope you enjoy :)


Those are photos of the preparations:


This is Rasa, leading the origami group and teaching everyone how to make small birds out of paper. Notice the birds waiting to be "hanged" on the right ;)



Bassem working on the Egyptian welcome sign, this was later decorated by the nicest polish girls because we guys could have never done it that well :)



Antonio doing a great job on the Italian welcome sign.



Beginning work on the big cup



The beautiful Jana creating small flags for all 6 countries.



Renata working on the most important of all welcome signs, the Lithuanian.



A penta-national group helping each other out with the preparations.



And these are photos of the results, the actual tea room in the city:



First of all, setting up the tent



Drawing footsteps that lead to our tea room from every direction.



Babies who happened to pass by with their mums just loved to join the coloring action, we loved for them to join too. I now have a dozen cute baby photos that are just adorable :)



The big cup in full glory, yes it's rectangular, and yes it can't hold any fluids. We still called it The Big Cup!



Almost everyone trying to untie the knots on the origami bird string.



A drawing being made by 3 different people with no coordination whatsoever, amazing how it turned out to be a real beauty



Everyone participating in a graceful polish dance during the polish tea room day.



And last but not least, our Egyptian team with the Egyptian table on our assigned tea room day.