Hello for the last time in class!

Here is my final work for this course. It can be a little longer than planned, but I tried to express all the feelings I have for the thesis.

I am excited to know that I was at this course, it gave a new perspective on all the things that are surrounding me.

And, of course, I’m grateful that Dr. Alexios Brailas was my professor: he made me understand that the Digital storytelling is not that hard – the comprehension of your emotions and experience is.

Thanks to everyone from the course! Hope that we can see each other later in this life. Peace to everyone!

This week is the last one before my departure home, exams at Panteion University are coming next week and it gives me some blues because I adapted to the life in Athens, its crazy rhythm, and I even started to understand what the cashier asks me.

So, also the last meeting is coming up too, so we tried to discuss our final work, the presentation. We were discussing in pairs about our ideas, so this session of brainstorming was helpful for me to understand how I should do the presentation, what the key ideas are, and how it will look like in the end.

In my presentation I will try to discuss about my journey of writing the master’s degree. I wanted to illustrate the initial idea of the thesis, my expectations, the real struggles, my feelings while writing it, some hopes about the help from the home University, last steps, and the expectations from the presentation in June.

Yes, it is hard, it is annoying, and it seems to be useless when you can’t really turn your thesis’s topic into reality.
My topic is “The impact of mass-media on the international image of Republic of Moldova”, and, as you can assume, it is on the borderline between such scientific genres as Journalism and International Relations. Still, I am not very sure where I would like to work further.

The last thing remains – do the presentation, turn it into a video, present in front of our small group… These steps seem so small to the time we’ve spent together.

As today’s task we had to make a virtual tour/museum of Panteion, I tried to reconnect with the places which I liked the most and would like to show to anyone interested

I made it in an interactive form on Padlet, trying to fix all the emotions and thoughts about the photographed places.

Here you can look at my perspective -> https://padlet.com/krshvtsk/gu3b50v2n6sbn82x

If you have some troubles with the link, you can use the QR code below:

Enjoy 🙂

The last class was about learning something new and trying to implement it into one of the forms of final work for this course. We tried to make a presentation, that later transforms into a video with your own narration, time used for the slide and many more 🙂

For the experiment we used the photos from the Wikimedia, which would describe our feelings during the day. Also, we were browsing for the Creative Commons license, which protects our artworks from being stolen.

I chose the next photo – it expresses the feelings that are haunting me for some time. I called this photo as ”Blank space”.

Feeling of peace of mind, being open to the new beginning.
There should be no shame or fear to change the job, place of living, environment …

Do you believe that you are rooted to your homeplace?
Have you ever thought to move to another country, leaving all your past behind?

I had many doubts in my past 10 years, but I also believe that a new place can give me new opportunities and perspective on this complex adult life

The picture I posted earlier is one which represents me the most:

•  I am alone;
• with a small backpack of my experience and memories;
• standing in front of a wide river of opportunities, that flow the same as the river, changing in a blink of the eye;
• the future might be freezing cold to me, but I am wrapped up with my spirituality and hope, same as the girl is wearing some warm clothes

We have a lot of things that are surrounding us: people, places, memories, emotions, experience etc.
But, in many of the cases, we forget about ourselves as a whole part of the journey called as life. It is not as comfortable to be an adult and have some free time from our duties as we wanted, but we still need to find this precious time to reconnect with ourselves, our values, ideas, mind.

In such case, we can take a spontaneous trip to new place, keeping your phone away, just admiring the place you are visiting and trying to hear yourself for a visualizing trick – do I need a change? am I doing anything right?

As for me, I took a trip to Kalamaki beach in a blink of the eye, after a sleepless night, a lot of stress and feeling tired emotionally, not that much physically: my mission was to see the sunrise at the beach, even if I never been to the seaside so close in the last ten years (views from Piraeus port are not in the account because I didn’t have the opportunity just to stay with my bare feet in the sea).

This trip made me feel a mix of emotions: I felt small in this world; free from the routine; curious what’s going to happen next in my life and how it would be if I see this view with my partner.

It was fascinating to see people who were very calm, they were admiring the sea view early in the morning without any rush, the old men were swimming in the freezing water.

In this trip I made a point that I must leave all behind because it makes me tired – I had a massive insomnia during the last days. I also had to reconsider my thoughts about the responsibilities I have due to my job or master’s thesis. Even the chilly wind wasn’t that bothering me.

Being at this beach made me feel myself like a child, a new-born. I had a mix of some great positive emotions, that I have missed for 10 years without the sea, being somehow exposed and open to something new.

I tried to think where my heart was while I was recalling these memories, and the memories made me feel free to do anything in this world one more time.

If this journey were a book and I had to give a name to it, I would call it as “Getaway” or “Running away”.

As for the last thoughts, I made some key points for the session:
– listen to yourself.
– no matter which path you choose, be patient to yourself.
– the destiny can’t be changed, so you have to accept the situation.

As most of the students in Athens, I didn’t have an opportunity to stay in the student dormitory (because there was no such option, as well). So, I had to browse many sites, forums and even Facebook Marketplace as my house during this kind of short stay in Athens.

Therefore, I found a nice shared flat in the Kypseli region with neighbours all over the Europe – Lithuania, Belarus, France, and Poland.
For sure, it is quite far from the Panteion University, but it was the most convenient variant by the price/quality criteria for me as a student.

I tried many ways to get to university, but the best one for me is by trolleybus (even better – in the morning after a long night with the laptop on my lap). The only trolley that has a direct route to the University is the №5, which comes as close as possible to the University’s dining hall.

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This photo of the Holy Church of Holy Trinity (which, according to Google is aprox. 10 centuries old, and has another name – Soteira Lykodemos) is not as good as I wanted, because Messenger is always ruining the quality. Well, it is genuinely nice church, but I haven’t visited it from the inside yet.

Personally, I like that local people are somehow good with the idea of being a part of the European community and most of the people can speak English on a basic level, so we can understand each other in the coffee shops or markets.

Even if the 2-hours lessons are something new for me (because wherever I studied, I had the 1.5-hour lectures), they are passing amazingly fast through the discussions and learning something new.

Next thing – another half an hour on the road, admiring my trip with the architectural wonderings in so recognizable Greek style.

This building is looking better on my way to the flat: the Academy of Athens is located at the Panepistimio bus and metro station. The assembly of the buildings are perfectly completing each other, so it makes this station unique and memorable.

look closely around you – the miracle is always there

#dst #PanteionUniversity

I would like to get acquainted with you, guys

My name is Ana Crișavițchi (spell it like ”Krishavitsky”), and I am from Orhei, Moldova (no, it’s not the capital city, Chișinău, it’s aprox. 50 km to the north from it). 
I am getting my master’s degree in International Relations at the Academy of Public Administration (Chisinau, Moldova) this summer, but I was always mentally closer to the journalism and stuff like that.
Oh, I forgot to mention that I am a Romanian and English languages teacher in my native school 🙂 
During one of the boring teachers’ meetings, I proposed the course about media education for the following academic year, and yes, my proposal was approved as one of the extracurricular courses for the middle-schoolers. 

While choosing the courses for my Erasmus experience, I examined all the possible courses, which are taught in English for this semester, and voilà, I’ve found the course about the Storytelling. It seems to me that the idea of having a personal blog, where I can share my experience day-by-day, became true, so the only thing right now is not to forget to post something 😀

What are my expectations?

None of those are impalpable: I will try my best to find out new techniques how to make my opinion heard & my thoughts clear. Also, I expect that I will leave Athens with the most memorable things.

I believe that the #dst team is the best choice to understand the world of blogs better.

See you next time?

Nice to (virtually) meet you!