Project activities

Day 1 – Welcome to Bucharest !
The participants will arrive at different hours of the day in Bucharest and they will be picked up from the airport or the railway station by the ATGR members. Depending on the available time of each group, the ATGR members will accompany them in visiting some of the tourist attractions of our town. Considering that the location where the activity will take place is quite far from Bucharest and there is no mean of common transportation, we decided to spend the first night in Bucharest. Thus we will gather for a welcome dinner.

Day 2 –Gura Raului chalet is waiting for us!  
All the participants will leave Bucharest in the morning to reach Gura Raului chalet. We will travel by a coach rented by ATGR. We estimate to be there by noon. After we will check-in and take the lunch we will have a meeting in order to present the agenda of the action, to inform our partners about the daily activity, about the fact that they will have to keep a diary of the team where they will have to fill at the end of every day their opinion and the evaluation of the activities from the current day. In order to get to know each other as representatives of different cultures, to start to communicate together and to become teammates we will use ice break exercises and we will implement role playings about the traditional habits and the symbols of each culture. Considering that the team from Slovakia participated at more than 70 youth projects from different countries and that they have a wide experience in intercultural exchanges, they will implement methods and exercises meant to make us interract and to form an homogene european team.

Day 3 –Biodiversity day 
This day will start early in the morning for all of us. After the breakfast, we will climb the Piatra Craiului ridge in order to observ the biodiversity and the spectacular landscape that this mountain offers. This will be the occasion for us to apply some of the climbing techniques which the ATGR instructors teach at the Mountain School. We will have the chance to study and to take pictures to unique flowers, most of them protected by law, to do birdwatching and to get to know some other species of flora and fauna. Once returned to the chalet, we will have an open discussion on the experience of the current day. 

Day 4 – More trees, more pure air !
This day is dedicated to the importance of planting trees. At the invitation of ATGR, 1 or 2 rangers from National Park Piatra Craiului will hold a course about planting trees and will inform us above the biodiversity concept. They will also explain us the status of a national park and of a natural reservation and which are the rules that we have to respect as visitors. 
There will be designed a poster with the decalogue (10 rules) of the visitor in the National Park which will be provided at the 6 shelters from Piatra Craiului, at the visitors center in Zarnesti and also as leaflets at the pensions from the area.They will let us know which are the problems they are facing with in their daily activity as rangers and the solutions they apply. The participants will be involved by providing ideas about the way that these problems are solved in their countries. As a recreative action, we will do an exercise by using mirrors to get different perspectives of a tree.
On the second part of the day, coordinated by the team from Poland, all the participants will be invited to present photos and to talk about the flora and the fauna protected by law in their country of origin. The members of each country will have to come with a story or a legend whose subject is a natural element: tree, flower, animal, place in the nature (mountain, pick, cave, river etc). In this way, every participant will have the chance to present us aspects of his national culture and to interact with the others increasing the intercultural dimension of the project. 

Day 5 – Education through outdoor activities
Most of the people consider that there are not so many things that can be done in a national park. The main objective of the day is to promote among the participants the sports and outdoor activities with low or no impact on the nature in order to break this myth. Given that sedentary life is a global concern in the modern society and that most of the youngs prefer to spend free time indoor, in the front of their TV/PC, we will proove them the benefits of an active life and will instil a healthy life style in order to understand and to adopt the active aging. For this the Hungarian team will share with us from their experience in programs based on healthy lifestyle, methods and strategies meant to awake the desire of exploring new horizons and to make the youngsters found new alternative for their way of spending time. The participants will be involved in outdoor activities like flying fox, rock climbing, rappel, cross and orientation. There are so many great ways to get outdoors and enjoy your own breathing space in the National Parks and we should all profit of this.
In order to enrich the range of activities and to create in the future an unitary sistem at european level regarding the tourists behavior in a national park, at the end of the day there will be a workshop where the participants will present what kind of outdoor activities are allowed in the national parks from their own countries.  This activity will be managed by the Romanian team.

Day 6 – Conecting to the nature
This day is dedicated to the knowledge of nature. In order to know the nature is important to understand it both with good and bad aspects. The participants will learn how to respect the territory of the animals, how to guard against possible threats from nature (storm, avalanche, animals), how to survive in the middle of the nature (how to find water and food, to light the fire, to build a shelter), how to addapt to the night conditions on the mountain (how to get orientate in the dark using the signs of the natural elemets), how to transport injured people, which are the international danger signals. For this activity there will be organised mixt teams so as a member of ATGR will be the leader in every team. The reason for this is that one of the permanent projects of ATGR is the Mountain School, where all the students are trained to face the difficulty that nature may bring you under.
At the end of the day, every team will have the opportunity to promote the traditional music from their country (through audio and video tools or simply they could prepare an artistic representation with traditional or mountain songs). The role of this evening is to let them know the cultural richness of the European area, the charm of national symbols and make them to be proud of belonging to a community so rich in values.

Day 7 – Stop deforestation! 
The participants will visit deforested areas. They will have the possibility to see what is the negative impact of the humanity above the nature and how many years will take to the nature to regenerate. Deforestation is a serious problem and has diverse implications: destroy the habitats and the niches for ecosystems,   affects biodiversity, provoque soil erosions. Forests slow the water cycle down and allow for more water to be absorbed by the soil; thus forest allow water to enter aquifers more rapidly. Forests decrease the impact of flooding from severe storms that are more potent and occure with increased frequency in the recent times. Forests provide a carbon sink; along with other plant life, forests are involved in the process of photosynthesis where they use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere along with water and sun's energy to produce the  needed oxygen and also produce sugars, cellulose and other compounds thus building biomass by trapping son's energy. Forests are a tool for fighting pollution. Finally forests help mitigate climate change known as Global Warming effect. People has to aware that destroying forests only worses the situation. Destroying forests is nonsense. As a practical activity, the members in the project will plant trees.
The slogan of this day will be Stop deforestation! 
After this visit, in the afternoon, the participants will project images of disasters from their own country and the impact of this disasters on the community and they will work to a leaflet which will be disseminated online in the participant countries.

Day 8 – Eco day
In this day, underguidance of the Lithuanian team, the participants will clean up the location nearby Gura Raului chalet and they will work on on-line brochure which will include information about green principles and practices to help the readers to incorporate them in everyday lives. The idea of this brochure starts from the following principle “while it is important to raise awareness about pressing environmental issues as climate change, it is equally important to empower people with practical ideas and tools that will motivate them to make lasting changes to reduce their impact on our environment”. The brochure will be created through an workshop moderated by an ATGR member which is Cleaner Production Expert. After this part, we will deliberate on the lessons learned by the participants in this project and we will continue with a discussion regarding posible projects that can be developed by the promotors in the future exchanges of the programme Youth in Action.
At the end of the day, the team of each country is invited to leave its personal print on the end of the project (each team will have to share to the other participants souvenirs representatives for their country – photos, traditional food and drinks, etc).
 
Day 9 – Leaving day
The participants will leave Gura Raului chalet and Piatra Craiului Mountain, having beautiful memories and  a large baggage of knowledges acquired during this exchange. We will be returned to Bucharest by the coach rented. During the long way to home, each team will read paragraphs from the diaries with the moments that they enjoyed most in the last days.