We can bee friendlier to the nature

On our last day - you will never guess - the sun showed up again!

Yes!!!

Naturally, we used this lucky incident to spend the day outside.

In the morning we planted some herbs and flowers on the bee meadow. A local TV-channel was there and interviewed us about it. Guess you could call us almost famous!









In the afternoon we climbed the Pohorje, Maribor's famous mountain (or hill, as they would say).
Okay, we took the cable car up and the bobsleigh down but there was some walking in between!

























In the evening we had our good bye dinner at a lovely restaurant. There are no pictures of this, maybe because we were too busy crying ;)

We had a great time in Maribor and would like to thank everyone who was involved in organizing this perfect experience for us!

By now we are all back in Hamburg and we miss Slovenia already! Hope to see it again soon!

Bye for now and thank you for reading our blog!

Today we prepared the eco-market at the Biotehniska sola.

Therefore, we baked some spoons again and assembled jars with panna cotta.

We also listened to a lovely lecture by 'evegreen', a company that produces bio-plastic tableware. That was really interesting!























After the market, which was a huge success and offered many different regional products, we went into town for a special occasion - SWING NIGHT!

We had so much fun and everyone was dancing!

In case you wondered how we spend our evenings:

we try to convince the sun to show up through yoga!

It is still raining in Maribor - we are still going!

Today, we started with our daily morning meeting:



After that we divided ourselves into two groups and started with our workshops.

The first group made a herbal tincture out of camomile, mint, melissa, sage, thyme, garlic, cayenne, ginger, propolis, honey, alcohol (91%!) and some other ingredients.











Also, we made lip balm and creams from bee wax, olive oil and honey:







And, of course, we had a little honey tasting:



Nele showed us her hidden talent and sewed bags!




Our second group spent the morning in the kitchen to bake edible spoons!














In the afternoon we went bowling together - that was fun!

The weather does not mean well with us - at the moment we deal with 100 percent chance of rain and zero sun hours.

Luckily, this does not hinder our productivity.

Today, we helped to produce apple juice. André, Biotehniska's master of wine, cider and juice, gave us a great insight into his everyday work. We learned about the production of sparkling wine and apple juice and we were able to watch and assist the process from apple to juice in all its steps.























In the afternoon, we went to the Enigmarium, an escape room in Maribor.

We enjoyed this so much!







Also, here are some more pictures from our last days that the students took - enjoy!

Today our students had their first day at the Biotehniska school in Maribor.

We started with some interesting videos that showed us the importance of BEEING FRIENDLY TO THE NATURE which is the motto of our program.



After that, the Slovenian students showed us the school property - including the animals!















After our little tour we started our workshops:

Beekeeping

Painting Beehives

Building frames for Beehives

Take a look at the pictures!















In the afternoon, we planned to go up Pohorje, Maribor's "hill" - or mountain, as we from the flat lands of Hamburg would call it - but unfortunately the rain crossed our plans. Instead we spend the time in the city and Maribor's shopping mall, the Europark.
Now we are playing games together - Werewolf!

We used the Sunday wisely and drove by bus to the coast.

First, we stopped at an ancient dripstone cave. This cave was the first touristic cave in Europe. The first visitors were sailors and traders in the 15th century. What an impressive sight!







After that, we drove to Piran at the Slovenian coast. The Slovenian coast is only 42 km long but very beautiful! It looks a bit like Italy here, which makes since it's close to both the Italian and the Croatian boarder. In Piran we visited the shell museum and then we enjoyed some free time. Some of us even went swimming! (In 16 degrees cold water!).
In the end we had dinner at a pizza restaurant.

We had the best day - thank you to our Slovenian friends for organizing this lovely trip for us!

The last round of our exchange program has started - the Hamburgers are in Maribor!

On Friday we took the train to Berlin where we slept one night. From Berlin we took an early flight to Graz yesterday where we were warmly welcomed by our Slovenian friends.

Here are some pictures from our journey:

















Later that day, our hosts showed us the city in incredible weather - what a treat!












Finally, we had a lovely dinner in town, what an awesome first day!

We set off from our school at 7.15 in the morning toward Italy. We arrived in Italy at 12.00 o'clock and boarded the plane at 14:00 o'clock. The view from the plane was very beautiful and interesting.



The plane ride took about 2 hours so we arrived in Hamburg at 16:00 o'clock. At the airport, the students from Rissen were waiting for us with a sign that said: »WELCOME TO HAMBURG«. That was a friendly welcome from them. Later, we went to the hostel to check-in and get our stuff out of the bags, had dinner, where student from Germany joined us, so we could get to know each other.



Our week in Hamburg was really interesting. Each day we woke up at 7.30 am and went to their school by train in the morning. At their school we worked on different start up projects,




prepared the material for Autumn Market in their workshops,



went to their classes to see how they learn, exchanged experience and knowledge, learned from each other a lot,



but also played outside, had fun. …It was amazing!!! After school we usually had some fun activities: Dialogue in the dark (extraordinary, unforgettable 90 min experience in the skin of blind people),



ice skating,



sightseeing tour,




basketball game, romantic boat trip,



selfie rally,



museum,… In the evening we hang out and went out to eat at different restaurants an (Mr. Kebab, Peacetambul…)



or we just went to the park DOM, which was the biggest amusement park I had ever seen.



But sadly our time to go home came too quickly, like 1,2,3 and boom Sunday was just around the corner. Of course, everybody was really sad that it was time to leave Hamburg because we met a lot of amazing people, who we never thought we could have met. So when we were getting ready in the morning (packing our luggage) our friends from this year's project and last's year project came to surprise us at the hostel. They wanted to spend the whole day with us, because we had time before our flight back. We decided to go to the city and the museum and do some sightseeing before we went home.



Our tour of the city ended at 16.00 o'clock when we had to go to the airport. Some of them even came to the airport with us to say our last good-byes. It was a truly sad moment when we were leaving Hamburg because we met so many great people. Some of us even cried, but we promised each other to stay in contact or even visit without school.



We boarded our plane and landed in Italy, Venice. The last thing was the car ride back home which took about 4 hours. We arrived in Slovenia at 1.30 in the morning. Tired, but full of unforgettable memories.

Let's start where it all began. It started on Sunday morning at the airport in Graz, where we were waiting for the group to arrive to Slovenia. They arrived at 11 am in the morning. We were waiting for them to welcome them into our home country Slovenia. They were very excited to see us after the long journey. Their first day was already busy becouse after checking in the hotel we went on a tour of the city Maribor plus dinner, where we were catching up on the news.
The next day we had a meeting in the morning at 8.30 am. Everybody was very tired. We had a meeting to learn about the plan of the whole week and to arrange people into diffrent groups: honey group, stone wall building group, jam making group. Next, we went to Račji dvor to our bee yard to start with the most important task, collecting honey from the bee hives, as our product main ingredient is the honey and it would be sold, with other product we made, at the big market on Friday. At 16:00 o'clock we went to Pohorje together to see the beautiful view of the city Maribor plus I made new friends, who later became my best friends.
Every day we were working hard and had fun and got closer and closer with the students from Rissen. All the activities that accompanied our production were connected to importance of the bees in our lives and importance to work together as one : we went to Escape room, bowling, to Bee museum in Radovljica.
The week went by pretty quickly and sooner or later Friday was here. You know the time to sell our products which we had been making all week. To be honest the big market was a big success. Many people came and admired our work and bought the products. And we were proud of what we managed to achieve with cooperative work.
After the market the week was almost over but there were still 2 more days left. So lets continue our story. On Saturday was the picnic day. A reward for our work. The food was delicious. Who prepared it ??? It was our teacher D. Jakopin. He has the skills of a master chef. The days spent the whole day with the Germans were very beautiful and to be honest I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. The friendships which were gathered through the whole week will forever stay in my heart. After the day was over all of us were sad but not because we didn't have fun but because we knew that this was our last day together so a lot of us cried.
And so the last day came. The Germans were leaving Slovenia at 8.30 with a bus to the airport. We came with them to say one last goodbye. The whole time while we were driving we had fun as much as we could but when we finally arrived at the airport almost everybody told me: Hey Miha, if your ever come to Germany just come and visit us we would be glad to see you again and of course I said the same thing to them. Afterwards we said our goodbyes one last time.
Goodbye Alina, Christiane, Nivan, Tjorven, Anton, Pascal, Markus, Sven, Jannick, Meli,… I miss you guys and I hope we are gonna meet again in the near future.
Mihael Unger