You could understand that an amazing party was due – just a look at the promo flyer [made by Mishca] left little to the imagination. All was expected.

Following a day full of media workshops – and after enjoying our second group dinner [arranged by our catering volunteer Asteris Mouzas, who made all dinner plans for the week] in the buzzing Valaoritou area – we eventually gathered around 22:00 to the Oikopolis self-managed space. Mediaterraneans arranged the space and practicalities, Oikopolis volunteers were taking care of the bar and the stage was ready to wellcome the Face Up participants.

We started quite typically, with the countries’ presentations. Marius presented Germany through some interesting facts and playing around with some stereotypes of the country – summed up in our all time favorite “schmettelinn video”.

Daniela showed us some important unknown facts about Romania – facts that exactly defy the typical stereotypes some europeans narrow-mindedly still hold about romanians.

Ibrahim presented Turkey in general and then shared with us the beautiful latest promo video of his sending organisation, Youth ART. He also instructed us on how to consume one of the delicacies his team brough from Turkey: the famous Mesir Macune: a famous turkish desert – made from 41 herbs and known to promote health and well being, as well as known as the turkish “viagra”. In fact, it is so popular in Turkey that it has a local festival in its home town that is recognised as a cultural heritage

Needless to say, from then on things started to escalate quickly.

The Greeks chose a french-german to present the hosting city. We then roared about the existential value of “Ithaca” from Kavafis – which the participants did not have a chance to actually enjoy due to technical issues: please read it [here]. It’s an amazing piece of art that has influenced us all at some point or the other. Then Artemis led us to a traditional couples’ dance from the island of Paros which served very well at pumping the while group up.

And then came the first ever international performance of our very good friend Liam Kritikal Powers. He performed 3 songs for us, with the obvious hit being Envy – which was shot in Thessaloniki last month under some pretty weird circumstancesJ

The crowd was literally captured, and demanded that he repeats the whole performance back-to-back. Which he happily did. Singing and dancing, drinking Jeegermaester, raki and wine, the party soon reached peak levels. Little did we know, the best was yet to come.

With the laptop online, a microphone hooked and wifi available, we could not help but try our own singing abilities by karaoke-ing many current and classic hits – ranging from Gloria Gaynor to Rage Against the Machine.

But when we really tested the limits of our audiovisual expression was on the Just Dance videos selected by Grzegorz. Last thing I remember, was a group fully choreographying Katy Perry’s “Roar”.

From then on things got quite blurry. There was definitely lots of dancing, singing, lots of photos, videos and crazy socializing. Let’s just say that the Intercultural evening served its purpose at bringing different people together. Joy and fun was abundant among the group. And – it is known – time hust flies by when you’re having a good time. The first guests started to deaprt after 4 am. Some were even comfortably napping on the premises. Our talented pianist firend couldn’t resist the piano in the room – and treated us to some relaxing chill out tunes. The last greek volunteers stayed to clean up the place. Lights went off eventually on 7:00 Saturday morning. They were not needed anyway. The spring sun was already shinning bright ahead of us;-)

Have a sneak peek into our night in the photo album.