StarTrek was a program based on the trekking activity. Trekking is walking for long distances but unlike other activities such as hiking, is more easy and beginner friendly. Because of this, the activities were easily adapted on everyone’s abilities and didn’t required a high level of physical condition. Another thing the program focused on was to induce the environmental awareness. There were a lot of educational seminars about physical disasters, such as fires and earthquakes.

At the beginning of the program, we experienced a lot of teambuilding activities in order to get to know each other and develop a friendly and comfortable environment. It seemed tricky to everyone to memories 23 names at first but with a lot of funny and motivating games we managed to do it just in the first day!

As regarding the trekking part, our first outdoor activity was to go Trekking to Mount Viggiano. It was about 1-2hours walking in nature and when we reached the hill of the mountain the view was spectacular! We all admired the small church ‘Santuario Madonna del Sacro Monte’ that was built at the top with great architecture. To get to know more places in Italy, a discovery trip in Matera was organized for us with a personal local tour guide. Matera is a city in the region of Basilicata and it is the European capital of culture for 2019. Its beauty and its history gave us for sure the greatest impressions to remember! Moving on to the environmental part of the program, we visited ASI, the Italian Space Agency, where a lecture and a tour made us more familiar about how the earthquakes are studied and how they affect the land’s shape. Last but not least, firefighting couldn’t be absent from the training courses, as fires are very common at our hosting area, the village of Viggiano. Volunteers firefighters show us how to use the hose in case of a fire but also taught us ways of fire prevention.

But as all Erasmus programs, a no less important purpose of it was to bring together people from different countries and share cultures and experiences. Through many projects we made as participants and the international nights we organized, we learned a lot about Sweden, Portugal, Bulgaria and Italy and we as the Greek team we did our best to present the culture of our country too. And don’t forget the food! We tasted a lot of delicious cultural delicacies that we didn’t have the opportunity to do before! At the end we left with many worth memorable experiences and of course a lot of new friends that we will meet again soon because ‘Erasmus world is a small world’. This was our take home message!