Workaway - travel, volunteer and experience new countries as a local [REVIEW] (no age restricktion)

  Hey fellow Steemians,   

as a working foreign student in Germany life is not always as easy as I want it to be and I've always been looking for an opportunity to travel as cheap as possible and be able to see new countries and possibly experience them as a local. And I, finally, found one great website, which gave a hope to be able to travel as cheap as possible and be also helpful for people in need and in exchange for my help and dedication get a free bed or a room or maybe even some food or even money.  

     I happened to find a website called workaway (https://www.workaway.info) on the internet one day when I was thinking about my free time this summer and was looking for a volunteer work in a hostel, something more international and social, in Portugal as I've been there three time this year and wanted to see more of it.  

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      I bumped into workaway.info and decided to have a quick look. In a search line for "workawayers" (this is what volunteers are called there) I chose Portugal, then its region and had about 72 Hosts offering a different kind of opportunities in that region. ![FullSizeRender-14-08-17-08-49-8.jpg]( You can also type some key words of what exactly you want to do and where and it will show you more narrow results. Then you klick on offers you like and read about who they are, what kind of help they are looking for and what they give you in exchange. You can also see their last visit of the website, the ratio of the answers, fb friends, feedbacks from people who's already been there, host rating saying how active the host is on the website. You can also see a month calendar telling you when green- they have places for volunteers available, yellow- possible volunteers needed and red - no availability. 

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     After checking that the host if perfect for you in terms of his activity, availability, working terms and conditions you can contact them and offer yourself as a volunteer providing some basic info of who you are, where are you live/from, what do you do, why do you want help them, how can you be helpful and when you want to come in a polite and friendly but maybe not too official form.  

Sounds good right?  

But here comes the important financial side, because to register on the website is not for free and costs around 30 euro for a year. That confused and disappointed me a lot in the beginning, but having a thought about it I decided to pay.  I must be honest with you guys, I do not have any regrets about paying 30 euros for a registration. I was silly enough now to have a look on the internet before paying, but I did it later on and, as always, you can find as many good as bad reviews with people saying that they had bad experience and had to leave after a week, or they felt exploited or they got no respond in whatsoever no matter how hard they tried.  

I paid and got my page quite quick. I started arranging it, creating a profile and giving some info about me like my age, whereabouts, where I want to travel and when. You have to type a small text about yourself, what kind of help you offer (if you have any specific skills and even if you don’t just write what you think you can do), spoken languages. You have to upload a profile picture and some other pictures of yourself or with friends or family or even a video (I didn't do that). Basically, that's it. No CV, no cover letter, nothing official and boring which I thought was really cool as most people have CV adjusted for the standard of their land, and it could be a huge mess if we all uploaded them.  

I started looking in July for work in September as I think planning is the right thing to do and unfortunately most of the requests I send to my favourite Portugal got not answered or politely refused. :( As from my experience with Portugal they don't hurry with the answer. Once a send an email asking about ERASMUS in the University of Lisbon and got an answer in 3 (!!!) months, which was of course too late and I thought maybe this is just their culture. So, I send about 30-40 messages in different countries like Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Norway, England, France and was completely ignored by the Spanish, and got a few late answers from Portugal, got 100% responds from all other countries and even 3 people found and contacted me themselves. 

In the end, I found an amazing host in Norway and in September I'll be there for about a month.  So, I'd say that WORKAWAY is very good website for people on budget looking for a opportunity to travel and experience a country as a local. On their main page, it's said that they have 30341 Hosts in 155 countries which is pretty impressive and reading the feedbacks you can see both sides telling you about their experience of working together. Futhermore, you can even contact other workawaers to ask them about their experience and more detailed info.  

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I'm very excited to have my first trip as a workawayer coming and I'll tell you everything about it. :)  

 I hope this information is useful for you and if you have any questions comment below. 

Thanks for reading

Best,

Valerie x