The Homestay

From an importance point of view the home-stay is a defining part of a trainee's life. Mine was great. Actually, it was GREAT!

But first, what is the home-stay about? AIESEC Chandigarh has this very good system of offering every trainee a home-stay, basically, a few days of living with a family. Besides many other benefits, one of the best things about this is that you get a taste of India, Chandigarh, food, traffic, people, but you get all this in the comfort of a family. I think other LCs should adopt the home-stay as well!

Let's get back to my experience.

The host family was very warm and welcoming, the minute I stepped into the house they greeted me, fed me, treated me as if I were an old friend of the family. And the funniest part: I was the fourth home-stay-trainee for that night!

I only stayed a day with the family, nevertheless it was a memorable experience. My home-stay-AIESECer took me around the city the next day, he also took me to an AIESEC event to Fun Republic, we had food and fun, and in spite of the heat, the scary prospects of a completely foreign country, where I did not know anyone, the home-stay experience made a good start to the whole internship.

Later on, the home-stay-AIESECer, let me name him, Tejbir Singh Reen, ended up becoming my trainee buddy, my source of cheer and comfort on the hard days, and a good friend after I left India. And because he was such an amazing trainee buddy, I will dedicate him a whole post!

Who, what, why?

The (main) purpose of this blog is to describe a journey of moving out of your comfort zone, via an AIESEC traineeship, the challenges trainees face when they move abroad to a completely different culture, the sort of attitudes we adapt when faced with challenges, the reactions and responses that will come from the locals, as well as the amazing and impossible-to-forget things that can happen during an internship abroad.

The place is Chandigarh, a North-Indian city also called City Beautiful, a definition that I came to understand only after a few months and only after visiting other cities in India.

The people are a group of people from all over the World, however, the author of the blog is me, a 23 year old Hungarian-Romanian girl, who was very eager to travel to India, and even though things proved to be very different from what I expected in my wildest dreams, my stay in India turned out to be The Time of My Life (with capital letters) so far.

Additionally, the blog is here to say a huge Thank You and to acknowledge some very special people in AIESEC Chandigarh, in Chandigarh, or simply in India.