18 May 2016 at 4 am, my phone is ringing to wake me up with its alarm, through my apartment window I saw that the sky is still on its pitch dark blue color and it reminds me that I will have my flight to Sicily 2 hours later, everything was packed the night before and I’m getting ready to take a shower and prepare some breakfast to keep me awake during this will-be-sleepy-early-flight at least until I reach the airport, we had an appointment with our taxi driver at 05.00 am sharp in the front of my EVS friend flat to get us to the airport and catch our flight.
We took around 1hr flight to Fiumicino Airport in Rome, and took another flight from there to Catania after waiting for couple of hour transit time, it’s our first time to go to Sicily, and we were so excited to have our EVS on arrival training that day, I always have an imagination that this island would be a little bit dangerous because of it’s famous history of Mafia in Palermo, but actually our training place would be held in a medium scale town called Nicolosi, under the highest volcano in Europe, Mt.Etna; from the airport we took bus to the center and then took another bus to drove us to Nicolosi, where our trainers waiting for us.
We were on the terminal bus and saw bunch of young people waiting their bus, they look like bring a lot of baggage and some of them are waving and smiling to our direction, then my instinct just instantly said if they are another EVS that doing their service in Italy, and I was right, I tried to talk to them and just found out that they are actually going to the same destination, Bianceve Hotel in Nicolosi, so we decided to go with one bus, packed with more than 20 young people from all over the world, mostly Europe and Asia, I was so happy to connect with this new people and getting to know each other is always be the best way to create a nice atmosphere during the training.
Our on Arrival Training is structured as a 7 days intensive training, a perfect mix of group activity and individual learning, a perfect mix of serious and relaxing activities, and also a perfect mix of formal and non-formal training format, I was really enjoying each activities that the trainers provide, the place were amazing, the people are nice, the food was molto buono, and the weather is just almost perfect!
And in fact I wish that our stay could be much longer than a week, so we could attend much more activities during this program, as a week of this packed activities would be a little bit too much for some people according to what they say, but overall, I really enjoyed it and things were just amazing! I’m so thankful for this kind of experience, to help me assess myself how far did I change (in a good way) during the EVS and reflect to the days before I did this so I could see and project myself on something that I do today for future.
Right after this training ends, we were lucky enough to have some time before our flight take us back to Rome, and we spent some time exploring the city of Catania and were really happy about it.
Reza, Indonesian EVS in TDM 2000 – Italy