Fears · Expectations · First names
Thirty strangers, one bingo sheet, and a genuine fear of bears.
Young people from five countries arrive at a camp in the hills. Nobody knows anyone. First task: line up by age, then by the first letter of your name — without speaking a word. Half the line is wrong. Everyone is laughing. The ice is officially cracked.
Two lists go up: fears and expectations. Someone writes "fear of being judged". Someone writes, in complete honesty, "fear of bears". Then the group invents its own camp rules — Bora Bora, the Hand of Silence, the Kangaroo — and a game of human Bingo ends with everyone knowing everyone.
Next morning, someone ties a giant web of strings across the hall…
Spider web · Turkish quiz · Racetracks
The spider web doesn't care about your plan.
A web of strings across the hall. Every gap may be used once, and every single person has to pass through without touching a thread. The group starts as what it thinks are two competing teams — then realises, mid-argument, that it was always one team. Two people jump clean over the web. A few get lifted and passed through horizontally, which nobody had planned at 9:47 in the morning.
Then the Turkish team runs a rapid-fire category quiz — animals, foods, sports — that nearly ends a friendship over whether "dinosaurs" counts as an animal. The afternoon is Racetracks: obstacle stations about ecology, inclusion and teamwork, cheered from the sidelines.
Then someone brought out a football — and mixed all the teams on purpose.
Mixed football · Mission Impossible
Fairplay football: the goal counts. So does everything else.
Mixed-gender teams, drawn on purpose, and one twist in the rules: you don't win on goals alone — fairplay scores points too. Helping an opponent up, passing to everyone, keeping it clean: all of it counts on the board. Stereotypes get benched, the pitch gets loud, and by the last whistle the group has reached its own conclusion — it was never about winning, it was about playing.
Afternoon: Mission Impossible. No teams this time — the entire group is one crew, racing to complete a list of missions about ecology and movement. At some point thirty people are lying on the floor spelling "ECO" with their bodies. It counts. It absolutely counts.
Next up: a mountain that didn't care about our plan either.
Piatra Neamț · Cozla · Flags at the top
The mountain doesn't care about your plan. So we changed the plan.
Bus at 9, and every country takes a turn as DJ — five playlists, one very loud bus. Destination: Piatra Neamț, and the forest path up Mount Cozla. The trail starts easy. Then the rain-slicked ground votes against us, and the group makes its first genuinely mature decision of the week: take the longer road, together, instead of the shortcut, scattered.
At the top: lunch with a view, flags out, and one photo where Romania, Cyprus, Greece, Türkiye and North Macedonia look like a single country. We ride the cable car down — partly because pride has limits, mostly because the forecast gives us twenty minutes. The moment the last person steps off, the sky opens. Timing: perfect. Smugness: earned.
Day five hid its challenges in the forest — at exact GPS coordinates.
Treasure hunt · Mantili · Konzul
Coordinates, a map, and a scarf worth sprinting for.
The forest hands us GPS coordinates. At every waypoint, a task — and no way forward until it's done. By the end, everyone can read a map, nobody is lost, and the phrase "I think it's this way" has been banned by popular vote.
The afternoon belongs to childhood games. Cyprus teaches Mantili: every player gets a number, a scarf waits in the middle, and when your number is called you sprint — all to traditional Cypriot music. North Macedonia answers with Konzul: dodge the ball or you're out. Reflexes, strategy, and a lot of shrieking.
The next day, we gave up our eyes. On purpose.
InnerDance · Sheep & Shepherd · Intercultural night
Blindfolds on. The music stays.
InnerDance, out on the camp lawn: blindfolds on, and your partner's voice is the only choreography you get. First minute: awkward. Fifth minute: someone lets go. Tenth minute: the whole lawn is a swaying, laughing, entirely unselfconscious creature. Then Sheep and Shepherd turns the game into a lesson: one voice steering a blindfolded flock past the ropes is exactly what it takes to guide a person who cannot see — clear words, calm tone, absolute trust.
From the afternoon until late into the night: the Intercultural Fair. Five tables, five flags, food you can't pronounce yet, and music and dances that simply refuse to stop.
After dancing blind, we argued about lunch. Productively.
Childhood games · Nutrition debate · CO₂
Games from home, a food fight (verbal), and a number for every journey.
Greece and Romania take their turn at the childhood-games workshop — the lawn fills with games our parents played, and it turns out running in a circle is an international language. After lunch, a real debate: what does "eating well" actually mean? Opinions differ. Loudly. Respectfully. Mostly.
Then every team sits down with a CO₂ calculator and computes the carbon footprint of its own journey to Romania. Planes, buses, trains — suddenly travel choices have numbers attached, and the numbers start an even better debate than the food did.
Day eight took our eyes away again — this time, for sport.
Goalball · Capture the flag
Sport, with the sound turned up and the picture turned off.
Goalball: a Paralympic sport, three-a-side, blindfolded, in a silent hall. You defend a goal you can't see by trusting your ears and your two teammates. Twenty minutes in, nobody's joking anymore — everyone is genuinely, quietly focused. It's the closest most of us will get to understanding what blind athletes do, and it earns instant respect.
The afternoon flips the mood: Capture the Flag as a full kingdom strategy game. Soldiers, knights, hunters, a queen — every role with its own powers, every kingdom with a plan that survives about ninety seconds.
Then we left camp for the city — and met people who train on park bars.
Iași · Streetworkout · Palace of Culture
A day in Iași, half of it spent hanging from a bar.
The city day: culture, history, the Palace of Culture, and the discovery that a city can be a classroom if you walk it with four other countries.
In the afternoon we meet Streetworkout Iași, the local calisthenics community. Warm-up together, then three zones: entry (exercises you can do anywhere, every day), medium (planks and everything that burns), and hard (pull-ups, first handstand attempts). The message lands: your body is the one gym you always carry. We get back to camp around 9 PM — in the participants' own words, "exhausted, but full of energy at the same time."
One day left. The weather owed us something — and it paid up.
Kataklysmos · Blind fencing · Youthpass
The flood, the swords, and the goodbye.
Remember the water activity the rain stole in week one? It comes back as the finale. Inspired by Kataklysmos — the Cypriot and Greek flood festival celebrated fifty days after Easter — the camp erupts into a full water battle, under the first properly sunny sky of the exchange. The weather took; the weather gave back.
Between soakings, the participants ask for one more thing and get it: fencing for the blind — masks on, eyes closed, listening for the blade. Then the Youthpass reflection, the final evaluation, the bonfire, and the strange silence of a camp packing itself into suitcases.
Ten days earlier we were strangers afraid of bears. We left as one very loud group chat.
