Mi Aventura SVE en Granada

lunes, 29 de abril de 2019

Semana Santa in Granada - Marci

As with most festivities, what would be a one- or two-day affair in most countries, ends up a week-long fiesta in Spain. It is no different for Easter either, which is celebrated during Semana Santa, which can be translated into “Holy Week”. Every part of Spain has slightly different traditions for it, but you can always expect a huge number of processions, over-the-top outfits and marching bands.

Everyone was telling us that we need to be in Granada for Semana Santa to see how cool it is. Of course, I’m pretty sure all locals think their own city has the coolest celebrations, but I know that Granada goes crazy for Semana Santa. Something that is very typical for Spain in the processions are these outfits with masks that makes the wearer look like Klu Klux Klan members, but of course the roots of these here are much deeper than that, so it’s a bad comparison. They also have huge marching bands and massive “installations” (for lack of a better word) that they carry, depicting scenes from the Bible.

I was quite excited to see what was going to happen during Semana Santa, but actually the weather turned really, really terrible for most of it. It was cold, with pouring rain and strong winds for most of the week. In fact, a lot of the festivities had to be cancelled, and anyway we were not in the mood to go out and get soaked in the cold rain – watching La Casa de Papel sounded way too inviting.

On Sunday, I did get to see some of the processions in the end, so I didn’t completely miss out, but I do feel like I certainly didn’t get the best of Semana Santa… I saw the Los Facundillos procession, which was a children’s procession and another one, which was either the La Resurrección or the Resucitado de Regina procession. I’m not sure which one it was, because everything was happening later than scheduled. They were interesting to see, but overall the experience was fairly disappointing. Maybe in a few years I’ll be in Granada again and I’ll understand what the hype is about. Until then, I’ll be more excited about a few good coffee places and amazing the nature around here!

martes, 23 de abril de 2019

Inventaciones

Márton Gorka 3:46 0 Comments

Recently we helped out again with the last event of the Inventaciones project, organized by the

Asociacion Carreteras Segundarias. Inventaciones is a multi-event project, which was developed to help social workers throughout Andalusia. The aim of the project is to help increase youth participation, and the international participants in the project, from Poland and Portugal came to share best practices with the participants from Spain.

If you are interested in what we were up to in the first event, read about that HERE. This time, we went to Armilla, near Granada to the Ciudad Deportiva ("Sports City"), where the sessions were held. The sessions here were all about summarizing the results from the local meetings held since the first session in which local politicians, youth workers and youth discussed youth politics, resources and youth participation.

The summary of the results and the further sharing of good practices sparked lively discussions, with many young people, youth workers, politicians and of course the international participants. While there were some clear differences in views and priorities between and within these groups, everyone gained valuable knowledge and insight into the state of youth politics and participation in the region and the summaries will be used to improve work on these issues in Spain.

martes, 9 de abril de 2019

Youth Democracy Academy

Márton Gorka 7:59 0 Comments

As usual, we are busy with all our projects and work, and we have recently successfully finished yet another youth exchange! This one was called Youth Democracy Academy, bringing together people from Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden and of course Spain! This was a special one, because the theme was youth participation in politics, especially related to the upcoming European elections in May. The participants were young people who are especially interested and involved in the topic, most of them campaigning at home, promoting voter participation in the EU elections.

During the project we not only built a great team, but did a wide variety of politics and elections-related activities. We interviewed people on the street about their knowledge about the EU and then tried to convince them to vote. We created promotional material that we used on the street and in the faculties to get people to think about European issues.

Moreover, we spent a lot of time contemplating how we could better campaign in our own countries and we tried to come up with the most creative campaign ideas through some unusual means: creating joke political parties, promoting elections in the world of Game of Thrones and Star Wars or rapping about politics in our countries. Clearly, not all of these ideas translate directly into real-world campaigns, but we think it was a great mental exercise and we came up with a ton of ideas that participants can take home and use. And most importantly? It seems like everyone had fun, because that's what is going to motivate people to act!

Enjoy a small selection of the tons and tons of photos I shot during the exchange: