From the 18th to the 25th of July, the youth exchange "Intercultural Crossroads in Europe" take place in the Salesian Centre WDM in Krakow. The next days the participants learned more about the intercultural communication, conflicts and how they can become creative and active as a European citizenship.

Within the communication session, we undertook many activities, in order to demonstrate the importance of communication. The first activity made us realise the difficulties of listening to two people at once. One person in the middle had to listen to two other people speak, at the same time. This activity lead to funny outcomes with the listener mistaking what both people had said. We also undertook an activity, whereas five people stood in the middle of the room and read different newspaper articles at the same time. It was impossible to decipher any of the stories as they were becoming muddled, and were extremely difficult to hear. This again demonstrated the importance of a quiet environment when communicating effectively. The final activity demonstrated the importance of non verbal communication, as well as verbal communication. In groups two people had to communicate a sentence, via non-verbal communication. Once the listeners had understood the message, which had been communicated non verbally, it was necessary for them to pass this on. The communicators had to shout the messages to listeners who could not see the communicators talking, or their hand gestures. This activity was more difficult than expected. It certainly highlighted the importance of using non-verbal communication, and of facing people when you speak to them.

On the next session we made a postman game. The participants were divided into different intercultural groups. In this game the European Commission wrote out a special competition for inventing a new sport. One of the conditions was to work together with the 5 other groups for the application. The groups had to create a sports and education game by communicating through letters with the other groups. Two group leaders played the post mans to deliver the letters. The difficulty was that every group had a special kind of problem with communicating with other groups. The participants realised during this session that to communicate with other groups which have another communication culture or language is very difficult.

On Wednesday afternoon we worked on special values and how every participant identify with these. The participants from different countries build little groups to go through several stations. They did different methods like a "written discussion", "express your faith" or "design a symbol of openness and respect". They approach the values through the matching methods and it was very interesting to see how values are expressed in different cultures. In the early morning on Thursday we were playing the game "I (am) like you". During this game the participants were divided in two "gangs" who were facing each other in the middle of the street. The ‘sharks' were ruling the city for a long time but the last years the ‘scorpions' have grown in strength. These gangs lived in fight over years and their hate against each other is very big. After one battle the gangs were playing and at both sides there was a strong feeling for revenge. The sharks decided to tear the scorpions' flag but during this action, two gang members were taken hostage by the scorpions. At the same time the city council tried to solve this war which was destroying their city. Two youth workers were tried to cool the fights down by starting up a conversation. But all the efforts died a silent death. At the evaluation of this game the group was discussing that this problems can also existed in the local youth and it they is very difficult to solve these problems.

Thursday afternoon the participants were send out to the city in small groups to find famous places. At these places there were local volunteers who request the groups to perform a task. When they were successful they got a part of a legend of Krakow. At the evening they were presenting their legend through a role play to the other groups. On Friday there was a day full of creativity. The participants could decide to join one of four workshops ‘music', ‘theatre', ‘dance' and ‘movie'. At the music workshop the participants made improvisation exercises with different materials. At the dance workshop the participants created a dance. There were created movies with lots of pictures at the movie workshop. The theatre workshop did many exercises on role playing and created an own theatre play. In the afternoon there was the presentation of the workshops.

On Saturday morning one trainer did a power-point-presentation of the DBYN and the Youth in Action-programme. After that the participants did an evaluation of the week. Than they prepared the mess in the afternoon and the farewell party in the evening which were the closure of the week. At the end of the week the participant grow from strangers to a group.

At the end of the youth exchange, each participant received a personal "Youth Pass", recognized by the EU.