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The next workcamp is underway! Since we are done with all of our written exams, we now have about six weeks of no classes to prepare for our final oral exams. And what better way to use those six weeks, than to spend two of them in a medieval silver mine in the southern Alps, right? That's what I thought.

And this time, I asked my best friend Pernille to accompany me :-)

After a quick layover in Amsterdam, we continued our flight to Nice, where we had a beautiful view on our landing approach. From Nice, we boarded a train to Tende, the village where our camp leader Mathias picked us up and where we also met all of our fellow volunteers:

Vasiliy and Svetlana (from Russia), Ege (from Turkey), Libna (from Mexico), Yuya (from Japan), Tereza (from Ukraine), Julie (from South Korea), Nora and Joseph (from France), Yannick (from the Netherlands), and of course Nille and I (from Germany).

After a very ... interesting car ride full of adrenaline (since Mathias loves driving at breakneck speed through the serpentines) along the many, many, winding roads into the mountains, we reached a turn from which the car could not go further as the road was in rough shape. So, we carried on by foot with our suitcases on our backs.

After a quick hike, we finally arrived at our destination: Neige et Merveilles (in English: snow and wonders – what a beautiful name!), an inn on the outskirts of the Mercantour National Park.

To the right of this panorama, you can see our bedrooms; Pernille and I share a room with Nora and Joseph. To the left are the kitchen, seminar rooms and of course storage for all of our tools.

Just a quick collection of springtime impressions I photographed while out and about.

Although I actually planned to just photograph our horses in the morning sunlight, this cobweb was too beautiful to pass by.

And of course little Champagner had to come say hi as well :-)

I spotted this little guy in the hedge around our garden – not easy to hide with such a brightly colored belly!

Yesterday I safely arrived back home (after a little hiccup with my bus connections that left me stranded in Berlin for a couple of hours. But hey, gotta love public transport in Germany).

The last two weeks flew by so fast; I was so nervous when I arrived in Prague and didn't know anyone or had any clue about what to expect from the workcamp ... safe to say, my hopes and expectations have been exceeded by far!

The amazing hospitality and kindness of the people we stayed with, and of course the many differences but even more so the many things all of us had in common even though we came from so many different backgrounds.

The beautiful nature as well as the Czech language and with that, the ways we learned to communicate with each other: Some of us didn't speak any English, most of us didn't speak any Czech – and still, we somehow managed to talk, learn, and laugh with each other.

For our last dinner, Giulio and Antonio treated us to a traditional Italian meal complete with homemade Limoncello (side note for myself for future encounters with said beverage: You've tried it, you don't like it. Trust me.)

Our main objective in this workcamp is to restore one of the old rooms in the right wing of the main entrance. The walls were plastered over with cheap materials during the 19th century, which we have to remove before we can adequately repair the original walls.

After removing the old plaster, we then carefully have to fill any holes in the 17th century walls, supervised by Petr and the other carpenters working with us. A very dusty and meticulous work, which we aptly nicknamed 'walling'!

Helena and I even made the local newspaper (looking very focused of course - professionals at work!).

Since we only have the one shower in our apartment, which we share with 12 people, it is always better to already get most of the dirt off under the old water pump in the courtyard - and it's quite the group workout as well!

Apart from walling, we also help out with other projects on site, such as painting the table covers for Café Loggie or building storage containers from wooden scraps.

Of course we also take it in turns to help Kinga with preparing the food for everybody. There is a very rustic feel to the whole complex, because a lot of stuff is still used the way it would've been 50 or 100 or 200 years ago. Including the water pump which I've already shown you, but also the way we cook - all of our food is prepared outside (on the oven you can see in the first post) and of course we first have to chop the wood for the fire that we're going to cook with. Which, for Kinga, is no problem at all!

And of course the dishes are done outside as well - who needs a dishwasher. Or a sink, for that matter.

Since today is Saturday and we don't have to work, we went hiking! Specifically in Hruboskalské skalní město and Prachovské skály, two rock formations in the northeast of the famous nature reserve known as Bohemian Paradise.

The sandstone plateaus were formed over 60 million years ago and then gradually worn down by wind and water to form the characteristic "needles" that you can see today.

There were some challenging spots along the way – but the scenery was truly amazing to see!

While the others relaxed down by the lake, Lenka, Tereza and I hiked all the way up to Valdštejn Castle – which, you guessed it, belonged to the same noble family as our loggia. The castle was originally constructed in the year 1280 but had to be rebuilt in the 16th century after it burned down, so today it combines many styles from different time periods such as Classicism, Baroque, and Neo-Gothic.

I did try to learn some more Czech words during hiking, such as the lovely word for spruce: "smrk". How does a word even exist without a single vowel in it?! Although my favorite one will always be "čtvrtek", the word for Thursday, which I still have not managed to pronounce without putting a knot in my tongue.

So who is mad enough to put their life on hold and volunteer to work in the Czech countryside instead?

Our group consists of eight volunteers: Antonio and Giulio (from Italy), Albina and Elena (from Russia), Adriana and Helena (from Catalonia), Dahye (from South Korea) and myself (from Germany, of course).

We are joined by our cook Kinga (from Hungary) and her son, as well as our Czech camp leaders Lenka and Tereza.

And how can I forget - our two most adorable little helpers! Though to be fair, mostly they are a welcome distraction and (sleepy) cuddle break for us ;-)

This is our shared bedroom - we all live together in a small apartment behind the woods that you can see in this old map of the loggia.

The landscape here is very beautiful, although the summer has been so dry this year that there are hardly any green plants anymore. The temperature is almost at 40 degrees Celsius during the day and only goes below 30 degrees at night. Because there hasn't been any rain for a long time, there are multiple dust warnings and alarms sounding throughout the city to conserve water and it is prohibited to fill up swimming pools and the like. The work is also very physically demanding and gets quite exhausting in this hot and dry environment.

After spending more than twelve hours on the bus to Prague, I met up with the other volunteers and one of our camp leaders, Lenka, to travel to Jičín (about one hour northeast of Prague).

Our home for the next couple of weeks will be the loggia of Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland (in Czech: Albrecht Václav Eusebius z Valdštejna), a Bohemian military leader most famous for his role in the Thirty Years' War from 1618–1648.

This picture shows the loggia from above: A very imposing archway overlooking a beautiful private park and garden, and leading into a courtyard surrounded by stables and other buildings on the other side.

The view from the inside of the courtyard is no less beautiful, with the archway just to the right of the picture. Sadly, most of the buildings have fallen into disrepair over the years, which is why the entire complex is now managed by a group called Valdštejnské imaginárium under the leadership of kastelán Jiří Vydra.

While the organization mostly targets the restoration of the old loggia, they also focus on arts and music as well, using the old buildings to host concerts, workshops, puppet shows and many other attractions for children.

Under the creative leadership of Jiří, the distinctive style of the loggia artwork used in these workshops and shows is achieved by linoleum printing, or linocut, and has a beautifully haunted feel to it:

Which of course we got to try our hand at later during the camp as well - with varying degrees of success (in my case, at least)!

When I got back to Germany from my exchange, having lived in the United States for a year, I knew that I wanted to get out more and see what the world had to offer. And although my exchange year wasn't an entirely positive experience, it did leave me wondering if the stereotypes that persist about certain cultures or countries are true. And if not - what could I do to change them?

I started my research about doing voluntary service in other countries whilst still living abroad; I quickly found out however, that most of the organizations require the people working with them to be 18 years of age or older. Which is why I had to wait until 2015 to start applying for voluntary service. The key word being "applying", because that's another thing I did not realize earlier: Most, if not all of these organizations require you to hand in an application and pay a substantial fee to be able to work for them.

This was hard for me to wrap my head around at first. I am willing to dedicate my free time to volunteer, which means that I won't get paid, and now I have to pay extra on top of that? How is this fair? As it turns out, there is a huge market for "white savior volunteering" or "voluntourism", as people call it. A chance for people to fly into some impoverished country, usually in rural Africa, stay at a five-star-hotel somewhere and take pictures with malnourished children; only to return after two weeks with a free t-shirt, telling everybody about their amazing trip and how good it felt to "make a difference". And for that, they are willing to spend about 3.000 dollars or more.

Same thing with, for example, sea turtle sanctuaries - now, I myself love wildlife and to be able to work in one of those sanctuaries would be a dream come true for me. But looking into one of the organizations running the sanctuaries, the entire thing sounded more like a beach vacation: Hotel stay, just 4 hours of work every day, with "opportunities to go diving, snorkeling, zip-lining, etc". These kinds of volunteering programs are so commercialized that I'm not even sure there's any actual work done there to help improve local infrastructure or actually help the children and animals in question.

To be honest, I was quite disheartened to read about all of these things. Maybe I'd been too naive from the start, thinking that as long as I didn't mind not getting paid, I'd be able to work anywhere. But as much as I wanted to do these programs, there was no way I could get the money for a trip like that - not to mention that I didn't want to further support organizations like this.

But here's where it gets better: I stumbled across a thing called "workcamps". Camps that are organized for the duration of 2-6 weeks in different countries, to support all kinds of local projects. Two organizations in Germany co-ordinating these workcamps are Service Civil International (www.sci-d.de) and Vereinigung junger Freiwilliger e.V. (www.vjf.de), which I want to encourage anyone thinking about volunteering to take a look at. In exchange for your work, you get free board and lodging - so all you have to pay is your travel expenses plus a small admin fee to the organization. And instead of some fancy hotel and catering, you usually get to stay with locals on site, together with other volunteers from different countries.

Between agriculture, history, languages, manual restoration, art, music, refugees, animal care and so many more, there is without a doubt a project topic that fits you. Depending on the project, you most likely get the weekends off to explore the area and get to know your fellow volunteers. And there is no better way to truly connect with people, to challenge your own bias and to learn about a country not as a tourist, but as a fellow human working together to create a better future.