Written by Valts Rozentāls
It’s a pleasure to meet you!
And what a pleasure it is. Either you think that first impressions are important or do not last – it does not matter here. Within a week you can learn a lot about others. Johannes is a handsome, thoroughly clever man in his prime. Paul, Johannes’ son, is a vibrant, calm, young man in his early twenties starting out in life. Both are joining us this year as an ‘off-court‘ support duo – taking over responsibilities and tasks which otherwise would cost us a big part of our waking hours and require much more juggling around. Most likely we would not ever meet back in Germany, but in the middle of Transylvania – everything is possible.
After the long journey the Youth (kids from Germany) are shown their lodging, followed by very late dinner. Needless to say – afterwards they quickly go to sleep. The Orga team stays up and spends the first evening talking, catching up, getting to know our new friends and coordinating the upcoming day. As we arrived late, the conversations continued late into the night until around 2AM. At some point the mind just keeps wandering off and there is no more energy left for willpower to continue on. A new day awaits and we will need the rest before we can welcome it.
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Meetup at the airport went without any challenges. On the first day after school was out we expected more people to be there, but this year the situation was quite calm. Security control went well and due to changes in cross-border regulations we were not required to go through customs.
Nevertheless – Déjà Vu, our flight got delayed. LH1670 was supposed to leave Munich airport at 14:50 and the first delay bumped it up to 15:45. Yes, the first, we received a couple more for 16:00 and 16:20. Delays like this today had a significant impact – as we still had to take a bus from the Airport in Cluj-Napoca to Bögöz (Hungarian; Romanian – Mugeni). Estimated travel time without stops – around 3h 16min. And this was the reason we would arrive considerably later as planned.