At last the day of our departure to Lithuania had arrived! On 11 June, six students of Class 4HLW – Alex, Anita, Julian O., Marlies, Max and Yannick flew to Vilnius with their teachers Ms Sperneder and Ms Schwarz-König to meet their partners of Kaunas Santara Gymnasium within the framework of an EU-funded project.

The reception in Kaunas was very emotional as most of the participants had met in the December of 2022, when the Lithuanian students and their teachers had spent a project week in Amstetten.

Together we experienced the beautiful landscape of Lithuania. We visited Trakai, a lovely village which features a castle built at an impressive lake, and made a boat trip on the River Memel, seeing rare birds and untouched nature. Of course we also did some sightseeing in Kaunas and we even had a reception in the City Hall. As the main goal of our project is an increase in intercultural competences, we enjoyed cooking traditional Lithuanian meals together with our hosts, like cold beetroot soup or Kibinai, which are spicy pastries. Our friends also performed Lithuanian folk dances in their traditional costumes for us, which we highly appreciated. What we liked even more, however, was the good relationship to the Lithuanian students and teachers, who have become close friends. To make the long story short, we had a lot of fun together.

We left Lithuania on 16 June with a lot of new experiences and fond memories and we are happy that we will meet our friends again next spring, when they will be our guests again. 

Mag. Astrid Sperneder