You get off the plane. Welcome to Poland. From now on, everything will be new. And honestly? There is something magical about that.
The cold greets you first. "Cześć!" You briefly wonder if you boarded the wrong flight and ended up at the North Pole. On the way to the flat, snow covers every street in an identical white blanket, making Google Maps feel like a suggestion rather than a guide. But you're a good volunteer. You find it.
Then, over the next few hours, your new flatmates arrive one by one. A quick hello, a bit of small talk, a slow realization that for the next two months you'll be sharing a flat with volunteers from Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Five countries. One flat. No idea what comes next.
The first night arrives faster than expected. Everyone is tired from travelling, but the urge to stay up and talk wins easily over the urge to sleep. The obvious solution is board games, and thankfully our friends from France had dedicated approximately half their suitcase to exactly that. Hours pass. Energy fades. And yet nobody goes to bed, because we're still waiting for the last volunteer to arrive. True to Mediterranean timing, our Portuguese friend showed up fashionably late. He was immediately forgiven, because he brought Pastéis de Nata.
It took less than two days for us to decide to shop, cook, and eat together. It also took about the same amount of time to unanimously declare the boys' room the official common area and dining room, purely on the grounds that it was the largest. From our very first meal together, one rule became clear: do not cook pasta carelessly when an Italian is present. The pressure is real, the standards are high, and under no circumstances do you mix chicken with pasta.
Every group has its anchor, and ours is our German friend, who somehow always has the right answer or the right solution, without fail, for absolutely everything. Our Spanish friend took a little more convincing to make a tortilla española for the group, but the wait was worth it. We even picked up a new expression along the way: "darle la vuelta," to turn the omelette over, which works both literally in the kitchen and as a metaphor for making a radical change in life. We've used it in both senses since.
Two months sounds like a long time until you're living it. Days move fast when the group is this close. We have breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, but it never feels suffocating. As the weeks go on, everyone finds their own rhythm: gym sessions, calls home, solo walks, a quiet coffee after a long day at the office or school. And yet no matter what the day looks like, there's always a moment when we're all together again, sharing how it went, laughing about something, inevitably ending up back at the board games.
In this time we've celebrated two birthdays, made friends with locals, grown in ways we didn't expect, adopted pets (a stuffed duck named Bratam and two real ones named Darek and Marek), and travelled to cities across Poland and beyond, to Albania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria.
The project isn't finished yet. But we can already say with complete certainty that we stopped being strangers on day one.
Thank you for your... attention.
Steven - A volunteer from Ecuador, whom we hosted for 2 months in 2026.