Day 1: Fruit Salads, Secret Friends, and a Whole Lot of Laughter
The first full day of NextGen: Future Leaders kicked off with that unmistakable first-day energy — half excitement, half “wait, who are all these people?” The youth hostel in Wojnicz was suddenly alive with conversations in four languages — Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, and German — as participants from all corners of Europe began connecting over breakfast and curiosity.
The morning opened with a warm welcome from the organizers and country teams. Before anyone could settle in too comfortably, the first energizer — “Fruit Salad” — had everyone running around the room, shouting out “apples,” “bananas,” and “mangos” in a whirl of laughter and confusion. It was the perfect way to shake off shyness and spark the first smiles.
Then came Bingo and Speed Dating, two cleverly disguised icebreakers that turned the group into a lively mix of stories: someone had a twin, another loved hiking more than beaches, and one participant confessed to having an irrational fear of pigeons. By the time the “12 o’clock meeting” rolled around, everyone was laughing like old friends.
After lunch, creativity took the stage with the Self-Made Portraits session — a wonderfully chaotic art experiment where everyone contributed one facial feature to each portrait. The results? A gallery of bizarre, hilarious “masterpieces” that looked like a mashup between Picasso and a carnival mirror.
Then came Mission Impossible, a team challenge that mixed puzzles, mini-tasks, and total mayhem. Participants dashed around signing lists, drawing venue maps, and racing the clock — learning along the way how easily leadership and cooperation can emerge from pure fun.
Before the day ended, the group established their project rules, signed up for Daily Task Groups (paparazzi, writers, interviewers), and drew names for the week’s mysterious Secret Friend challenge — a mission to secretly brighten someone’s day.
As the evening games wrapped up, the hostel buzzed with laughter and whispered guesses about who might be whose secret friend. Day one ended not with exhaustion, but with that unmistakable feeling of something special beginning — the start of new friendships and the promise of a week full of discovery.
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