Belgrade in Radlje

And … finally came the time of international exchange, which lasted from 13th to 18 th January 2020. It was Monday when girls from Belgrade, the biggest Serbian city with 1,500.000 inhabitants, came to Radlje ob Dravi, a small town in Caritnthia (Koroška). For the girls, used to a city, Radlje was a small, nice, safe and clean town – which we take for granted. While our guests were still on their way, our students were awaiting them at the Pesnik mountain cabin (1101 m elevation), full of expectations, confusion (»How are we going to communicate?«), excitement, curiosity. They even prepared a Добродошли (dobrodošli) inscription. After 10 hours of driving on one side and a little bit of waiting on the other, the girls finally met. They connected imediately, within the first moment, and there were no more worries about communication.

Namely, we had an ace up our sleeve: a student that came to our school from Serbia in the beginning of this school year. She did her job of an interpreter with flying colours.

The first night we slept over at the cabin and that was a chance for girls to get to know each other and come to the agreement about where which girl is going to sleep over. After breakfast the next morning we set for a walk to Ribnica na Pohorju, where the girls enjoyed at least a little bit of winter fun. Then we returned to the valley. We took our guests on a tour of the school and a quick sightseeing of Radlje followed. Then a long expected departure to the hosts’ homes came.

The second day began at school. The girls from Serbia first attended the lessons and later there was a workshop about Inscape laser design. We made some laser cut products for Mother’s Day. The laser was given to school for the purpose of the project. After the educational part of the day we went bowling, where the girls showed us, the menthors, „how to throw the ball“.

The third day began similar as the day before. Lessons, workshop, and then we wanted to take a look of how virtual reality looks like. This is likely going to be our next project’s main topic. At this occasion, we would like to thank the Stroka company, which borrowed us VR glasses. Later that day, we went to Fala to see the hydroelectric power plant, and the city of Maribor. There we also skated and successfully escaped out of the escape room!

Time went by with the speed of light and already the last day of our socializing was there. Lessons again, laser workshops and programming with Micro:bits. A hike to Stari grad was the conclusion of our befriending. Our guests were very enthusiastic about the view of Radlje and took a lot of photos.

The time we spent together went by too quickly. Girls could hardly draw apart … but they already have a new motivation for school work: counting down the days until April 20th, the day they will meet again in Belgrade where there are new adventures ahead and new things to learn.

Menthors of proSTEMgirls