Like a dream. It is not one.

It starts before you leave. The night before, the bag is packed and then unpacked. You read the infopack again. You wonder whether you signed up for the wrong thing, whether your English is enough, whether everyone else already knows each other.

They do not. Nobody on that plane knows anybody. That is the whole point, and it is also the part nobody says out loud.

The first twenty-four hours are loud and awkward. Twenty-something people, five or six countries, one shared kitchen. Names you will forget and ask for again. Someone always cooks too much pasta.

Then something shifts, usually on the second night. The group stops being a list of nationalities and becomes a list of people. That shift is what the programme is designed to produce, and it cannot be faked.

You would not have chosen it. A mountain refuge, a farmhouse without signal, a town you had to look up on a map. That is deliberate. A place you would book yourself teaches you what you already expected.

Accommodation and food are covered by Erasmus+, and travel is refunded after the project up to the programme's maximum for your distance. Above all, you are asked to bring attention.

It ends, as dreams do, on an ordinary morning: twenty people leaving for twenty different airports. What stays is harder to name. A second language that is no longer a school subject. A group chat that is still active a year later. The confidence of having done something difficult, far from home, and having been fine.

You come back awake. That is the name.