Some of you may have seen my previous blog post about my time in Istanbul, but that was only a small part of the trip. As I mentioned before, my friends and I were given the opportunity to travel to Turkey to take part in a youth project about substance abuse. All travel expenses, food and accommodation were covered, apart from the day we spent in Istanbul since it was not part of the project. The project itself lasted a week and took place in Bursa, which is another beautiful city in Turkey.

I had never been on any sort of youth project like this before, and I didn't really know what to expect. To be honest before we left I was mostly excited about the fact that I was travelling to a country I had never been to with some of my best friends, and I didn't think too much about the project itself. However now I can say that I couldn't have been more wrong about what sort of experience I was about to have.

In this project there were people from seven different countries, those being Malta (us), Turkey, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Latvia. I had never even met anyone from most of these countries before, let alone spent a whole week with them. There were people of different ages, different backgrounds and cultures, and obviously different characters, but we all got along so well. 

Apart from all the workshops we had related to substance abuse (which may sound boring, but were actually really fun and interesting), we also had lots of random games throughout the days and went round many beautiful places in Bursa. We had three cultural nights where everyone learnt more about each country, which always ended up in everyone dancing and laughing together 'til we couldn't feel our feet anymore. On one day we even went up to Uludag mountain which was incredible especially for us Maltese girls since we never get any snow here! We also paid a visit to the Turkish baths which were a very unique but great experience.

It's actually been a month since we got back from this trip, and I've been postponing this blog post for a long time simply because I can't possibly find the right words to explain what an incredible experience this was. I didn't think that I would care much about the people I was going to meet, but now I can honestly say that I've made some amazing friends that I will hopefully never lose contact with. The last day of the project was an emotional rollercoaster, and I didn't think saying goodbye would be so hard. I still get lots of happy/sad feelings whenever I look at the photos or anything that reminds me of the trip, but I'm SO glad that I decided to go on this trip and I'm lucky that I got to share it with so many amazing people that I'm now lucky enough to call my friends.

Sorry for the amount of photos, I couldn't help myself.

xo