There is a difference between staying somewhere and living somewhere. In Hondarribia, in the Basquelidays rural house, we lived.
I arrived in the evening, after a full day of travelling. The door was already open. From the kitchen came laughter and the clinking of glasses. Someone was pouring wine, someone was slicing cheese, someone was telling a story in Turkish while another person tried to translate into English — and nobody was in a hurry. That was my first impression of this house: time moves differently here.
Basquelidays is not a hotel. It is a house with a soul — wooden beams, windows overlooking the Bidasoa river, and France right there, on the other bank, lit up at dusk. We shared the space, the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallway. And it was precisely in that sharing that something happened that no seminar could ever produce.
In the evenings, when the working part of the day was over, we would all gather in the living room. No agenda, no structure, no moderator. Just people and stories. A woman from Moldova talked about her project with rural women. A colleague from Turkey showed photos of products from the Zembul cooperative. Someone from France described how social cooperatives work in Paris. And I listened, realising — these are stories that are never heard at conferences. These are stories that are only told when people live together.
Mornings began slowly. Coffee, breakfast, a gaze through the window. Someone would step out for a short walk along the river. The medieval walls of Hondarribia in the morning light look as if they belong to another era — and yet, in that very same space, we were building something entirely contemporary: trust between people meeting for the first time.
Erasmus+ projects have their frameworks — activities, results, reports. But what truly makes a project successful is not in the paperwork. It is in moments like the one when someone at the table says “it’s the same where we come from” — and suddenly you realise that a woman from Tunceli and a woman from Serbia and a woman from the Basque Country live different lives, but share the same struggles.
Living together at Basquelidays taught me something I will carry with me: that hospitality is not a service. It is an act of trust. The hosts from ABARKA welcomed us not as project participants, but as part of their community. And for those two days, we truly became exactly that.
When I closed the door of that house on the last morning, I turned once more towards the river. The Bidasoa was still flowing, quietly, between two countries. And I thought — just like us. Between different worlds, but in the same current.
Creative Station, Serbia
Guest partner on the “Stronger Together” (STOG) project
Erasmus+ KA210-ADU · March 2026
