For ten days in late spring, a mountain chalet above Rokytnice nad Jizerou filled with young people from seven countries. Our team welcomed them to Vibe Check, here in Czechia’s Krkonoše, where pine and spring sunlight came through the windows and the first morning opened with everyone in one room, deciding together how they wanted to spend the days ahead. The theme was wellbeing, and the group spent the programme taking it apart and building it back up.
Agreeing How We Would Live Together
On the opening day the group built its own Code of Conduct and shared out roles, so the programme ran on rules the participants had set, not ones handed to them. The icebreakers came first, Human Bingo and a round of Fun Fact Find loosening up a room where most people had arrived as strangers. By the evening, names were sticking and the seven national groups had started to mix at the tables rather than cluster by language.
This is where a youth exchange does its quiet work. A group that agrees its own ground rules carries them for the rest of the exchange, and participants who set the terms take responsibility instead of waiting to be managed.
Taking Wellbeing Apart
Midweek the programme turned to the question the whole exchange was named after. Working in international teams, participants pulled wellbeing into its mental, emotional, physical, and social parts and traced how each one leans on the others. Body Precaution made the physical side concrete, while a yoga workshop and a digital-detox stretch tested it in practice rather than on a flipchart.
The work stayed hands-on. In Emotion Mapping and Through the Cracks, small teams turned private experience into something they could point at and talk about, and the honest conversations tended to happen while everyone was busy making something.
Saying It Without a Single Word
One task asked the groups to do the hardest thing on the schedule: explain a feeling without speaking. In Silent 60, each team made a short film about wellbeing with no dialogue, leaning entirely on movement, framing, and expression. Showing something like quiet panic, or the moment it lifts, turned out to be far harder than describing it. Between storyboarding, filming, and editing, the groups picked up a real stack of visual and digital skills, and the finished films landed harder than any voice-over could.
A Mountain Town in Spring
Evenings belonged to the cultural nights, one country at a time, each group bringing food, music, and games from home. On the Czech night our participants put their own corner of the week on the table. And because the exchange ran across the end of April, the group joined Pálení čarodějnic, the Czech “Burning of the Witches”, a real spring tradition that happened to fall right in the middle of the programme, so the country turned up not as a backdrop but as part of the exchange itself.
What the Week Left Behind
By the closing day, after the Youthpass ceremony and a Secret Friend reveal that had been running quietly all week, the participants left with something concrete: a clearer sense of how to look after their own wellbeing, and the experience of having worked it out alongside people from six other countries. For our team, Vibe Check was another week that did what these exchanges do best, sending young people home able to do something they could not do before.
Photo Gallery
A few more moments from this activity :)
Check these and more photos in the activity’s photo album.
