From 30th January to 3rd February 2020 AEGEE-Brno participated in the first part of an exchange with AEGEE-Groningen. Altogether 9 AEGEE-Brno members in 2 cars started their trip to the Netherlands with the overnight stop in Magdeburg on 30th January, where all the Christmas decoration was still to be seen in the city centre. 

On Friday morning we woke up early and headed towards Groningen. To kill some time on the way we were playing various games, which took away the driver`s and navigator`s attention away enough to cause us around 7 “shortcuts” on the wrong exits from the highway. So we finally got to our destination around mid-late afternoon.

After the arrival, we were accommodated at our hosts from AEGEE-Groningen (each person somewhere else) so everybody had their own personal AEGEE-Groningen member to speak with before the first get-together. The whole group finally met in the evening when we went to rent our bikes, which we were using during the whole exchange (AEGEE-Groningen managed them for us for free). 

The first dinner was at the pancake ship, which is a restaurant (actually in the ship on a canal) with the biggest choice of huge pancakes all of us have ever seen. After the dinner we took our bikes and went to explore the nightlife of Groningen city centre.

The highlight of the second day was the city tour completely done on bikes. We biked around the whole city and even managed to get a bit out of Groningen to see a windmill. In the afternoon we took our free time to walk around and gather energy for the evening (did I mention that Groningen is the city of places without closing time…?). 

On Sunday we started with a brunch for a change, which saved us some time to make ourselves a game afternoon in the brand new modern tower in the city centre called Forum (we were lucky as it was opened just 2 months ago). The dinner afterwards was proof that it doesn`t matter, which country you come from or what traditional cuisine do you like, everybody will, in the end, agree on the Italian food 😉

The last night was spent in the pool club so we could just chill a bit (especially appreciated by the drivers) and say goodbye to each other in the end. Overall we had a couple of amazing days in Groningen, maybe just the weather showed us sometimes that it was not the smartest idea to come with the total number of zero umbrellas. 

So now we can start preparing for a group of Duchies coming to Brno in May 🙂