Ceren Tost from Karadeniz Technical University/ Turkey

I am Interior Architecture student, I spent spring semester 2021 at VTDK during the Covid-19 pandemic period. I am so happy to have the possibility to assosiate myself with this page and being part of an Erasmus student.

I spent very good time at VTDK, even though it was under pandemic conditions. We were 15 people as Erasmus mates. When we arrived to Lithuania, we spent 14 days in quarantine. During this period we were ordering food online, and one of our Erasmus mentors Alisa made her best to help us with whatever was needed. Mostly I spent my quarantine period exploring local destinations, food and culture. I prepared a to-do-list for cultural places, museums and fairs.

After our quarantine have ended we started exploring the nearest places. We tried traditional dishes šaltibarščiai and šakotis. At Easter holidays we got Easter sweets present from VTDK. It was a very nice and kind gesture from them. We went to Verkiai Regional Park with our mentor Alisa to pick willow flowers and at Easter eve we decorated our table with the bouquet to celebrate together. In the second part of April we started going to the nearest cities. My first destination was Trakai Island. It was a fascinating view with fresh weather and beautiful nature. All you need to enjoy this place is just a cup of tea. My next destination was Kaunas. We went there on Mother’s Day. We explored flowers’ bazaar and took a walk in the Old Town streets. We went to the 9th Fort of Kaunas Fortress. It is an impressive monument. During my exchange period I went to many museums and galleries in Vilnius, most of them are about Lithuanian history and modern art.

One of my favorite activities was walking around and taking photos of historical buildings at the Vilnius Old Town streets. I wish I could have attended Open House Vilnius architecture weekend, but unfortunately it took place after I left. I suggest you to keep your eyes on fairs and events during your exchange.

Our lectures have kept going online the whole semester. I truly can say that online studying system at VTDK is really good. We could communicate easily with our lecturers and we have worked on same offline programme. We were submitting our tasks through the Moodle system. Lecturers checked our tasks and gave us feedback through this site. The lecturers replied to all our questions at once, and we haven’t had any problems with them. We were lucky because we had kindly understanding lecturers, they even recommended us places to be visited in Lithuania. I truly recommend VTDK for future Erasmus students, I believe that all of them will have unforgetable memories from all these experiences.

As a last word I would like to quote a sentence from billboard text at the airport: ”I didn’t know where Vilnius was, luckily pilot did.”