A Different History Lesson

History is an important subject in school; it brings us back to past
and by acquiring knowledge of the past periods we can avoid many unnecessary
things in the future. However, history lessons are usually boring. Therefore,
we have decided to turn it into something more interesting; in particular, to a
nice story-telling day outside the classroom. That was exactly the idea of ESN
Košice and ESN UNIPO Prešov.

We have gathered at the Šariš castle in the region of Šariš, East
part of Slovakia. Our aim was to connect several activities together by helping
and learning about the local culture and history. In the project, Slovak
students and local volunteers joined Erasmus students. First of all we cleaned
the area around the castle. Fortunately, the local people seem to be aware of
environmental issues because the area was not extremely full of dirt and
garbage. By this observation we have reached the conclusion that people of this
region take care of their surroundings. The second part of this project focused
on story-telling and learning about the history of Slovak and foreign countries
of Erasmus students. We have heard interesting stories and some details that
you do not hear in schools; war stories of our grandparents or just the feeling
and the way of life of our parents 30 years ago. We had very nice time at the
castle and did not want to leave that beautiful area. Therefore, we have
decided to prolong our historical project by playing historical games like
cards, petang, feel like princes, princesses, and knights. That moments we
enjoyed intensively as well.

The whole project was a nice success; we have learned something
about the history, known the local people with the passion for history, clean
the area from the touristic garbage and most of all spend a wonderful day in
the nature.