NPS in Amara, Romania

Because we couldn’t attend the Future in Salzburg we decided to go to the National Preparation Seminar in Amara near Bucarest.
Sarah from LC Vienna joined us on our flight from Vienna to Bucarest, so the three of us where the austrian delagation representing our country at this conference in Romania.
The journey was quite exciting and kind of a survival training, from banessa airport in bucarest to the Amara where the conference was held we hat to take several different busses, one needed 3 hours for 100 kilometres so you can imagine how the streets look like in Romania. Thank god we met Alina from LC Bucarest in Bucarest downtown, she told us which busses, trains, subways etc. we had to take.
At around 3 in the afternoon we arrived at the ‚charming’ Lebada ‚hotel’ in Amara. It looks like a huge communistic ‚Plattenbau’ in the middle of nowhere. No real streets, no shops, no houses, nuthing but the hotel.
Just look at the pictures.
After we dropped our luggage in our room we crashed the main plenary room where all the newies and the chair of the conference, Bene from LC Vienna, just held a workshop. We where splitted into different homegroups and were from the beginning part of different teams mainly consisted of romanians.


After some minutes we were asked on stage for being introduced to all the newies and facies. The crowd (about 500 Romanians) claimed an austrian roll call so we performed together with Bene a ‚Jodel-roll-call’ we didn’t even know...
A really nice experience was the open-minded collegues from AIESEC Romania who welcomed us really warmly and were kind and helpful at any time. We made a lot of friends there, if everybody keeps his promises, we will have hundreds of visits during the next weeks, let’s see. We got to know interesting facts and insider information about Romanians and there culture.
During the day we hat plenaries, workshops, meetings with our home groups where we discussed and reflected the daily issues and last but not least insane parties at night!
Thursday we learned about the AIESEC culture for a better understanding of the organization. The Facies of our home-groups were our contact persons and at every time friendly and available. On friday lectures about leadership were held. Saturday was sustainability-day. In our opinion the most interesting day, representatives of international prestigious enterprises such as Microsoft or the Royal Banc of Scotland, ING, or Junior Achievement gave talks and workshops to the newies.
On Saturday night there was a big awards gala, the different LC’s of Romania were honoured and got prices for special achievements. Everybody had to dress up. Afterward there was a huge party again where we met some AIESEC Alumni from Austria who are on exchange in Romania now.
During the whole conference we were amazed of the passion of the AIESEC-people and defintely proud to be a part of it, even though it was really much and sometimes surprising for us in the beginning.

The parties didn’t start before 1 o’clock in the morning and lasted til the sun rised at the nearby lake.
Our personal highlight regarding the parties was our stand at the global village party where we had to present Austria. We put on our ‚Lederhosen’ and Sarah from Vienna wore a ‚Dirndl’. We carried Schnaps, Stroh 80, Speck, Bread, Schmalz, Kernöl, Mannerschnitten, Mozartkugeln and many austrian flags to decorate our little area. After some minutes all the stuff was gone, maybe because the meals were usually not that enjoyable at the hotel, they even tried to eat our bacon rind and drank the oil purely.


After that we partied all together really hard and everybody was pretty wasted because the Romanians brought their traditional Schnaps Pelinka.
Another highlight are the unique Romanian roll-calls that sound much better than the austrian ones. Make your own picture:
Summarizing we can say that our first conference, an international conference, was a great experience for us because we got to know much about basic structures of AIESEC and of Romania as a culture and ist people. An international conference has many advantages and we would recommend it to eyerbody who is interested in international contacts, making friends and and an adventurous jouney!

Phillip Fröhlich and Elias Resinger