Day 5
Day 5 - 10 February 2009
Website Please
Andrea – our head -, Anja and Stephanie (Germany), Vytas (Lithuania), Michal (Poland), Szilvia (Hungary), Gwen (Denmark) are participating in our work.
At the start we did a little brainstorming on the topic our main tasks at the beginning were state, community and personal issues in the past, and in the future.
After the first impressions we decided to go deeper in the theme of tourism because you can combine every single main task all together and work with or on tourism. You must know that here on Achill Island the tourist season is mostly three months (June-August) in the summer. We want to give some ideas how they – the locals on Achill – can make it more attractive the all year round with the things they still have, like e.g. climbing, surfing or eating good meals.
Our main project in Keel/Achill Island for tourism is now to create a website for tourists, to show them, how wonderful Achill Island is all year round. We are happy to have the Polish Michal in our group as he knows everything about how to create a website and he is also creative with a paintbrush and pencil.
In the next few days we will do some (deeper) interviews with the locals and we hope that we can combine our ideas with their’s, so that our end-result of the website will be perfect and helpful for the Achill-tourism-infrastructure and the tourists, too, who want to be informed about the activities, which you can do here in every month all of the year.
We are trying to show the different tourists (e.g. backpackers, families, artists) to show them some examples for packages with combined services like e.g. the travels/flight, the cottages, locations for dinner, different sport-activities (horse-riding, biking, surfing, painting, cocking-courses and babysitter-service for the parents) with prices.
Our topic for today is to get more information from the tourist-office and local people. In the following days we will put all information together for the best result on Friday evening on our presentation.
Stephanie Lohner (German group)
Are you Tolerant?
For those, who are travelling a lot and meeting new people, the lecture “Critical incidents” should be very useful and help to avoid uncomfortable situations, which are happening, when we know too less about foreign countries and cultures.
We talked about critical incidences caused by different understanding of greeting kisses in Brazil, friendly hugs in China, smiles in England, flipping the signs in Ireland, friendly conversation in Jordan and dinner time in Spain. We have learned about this in a way of a game. We split into groups of two or three students and tried to act the critical situation, which could happen in the particular country. Then the others did say what went wrong.
After this we were sharing our own experiences that we have had with foreign people not knowing very well their culture. There were told a plenty of funny situations that we have defined as critical incidents and illustrated with our painted pictures.
The lecture teaches us to understand, that everyone is different and we should be more tolerant to every culture. If you want to be accepted as you are, you should also carefully accept others.
Toma Naujokaité (Lithuanian group)
Europe, merci!
Poem Cottage 22
In cottage number 22
4 people got to know each other im Nu.
Thanks to Dávid, the food is always there on
time,
But only healthy, and never wine.
The atmosphere is always nice,
Because of Maria’s perfekta advice.
Our ifjonc got promoted right away,
Anne is leading a workshop from yesterday.
Chudiesno there is Hugo around,
Who is one of the nicest roommates to be found.
This is Europe as you see,
Visit us and become our friends, merci.
When we reached heaven, we put down an anchor.
'Losing my Religion'
Should I Stay or Should I Go? Do you hear the sound of many different voices?
- No, it’s not the ocean. It’s people who express their good emotions. They speak and laugh. But the most important are the songs of love. Yes, the karaoke party takes place this evening and everybody comes here to show if they are good at singing. At first we did the competition to demonstrate our knowledge of Irish tradition. Then Maria, Stephanie and Reka took the microphone and sang ‘Losing my religion’. They were followed by many different songs. Swedish, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Germans and Irish really couldn’t finish it. But all parties have their endings. This one has brought us some cultural findings. However, if you feel there is no need to hurry, then you are welcome in to after party!
Marijus Petrauskas (Lithuanian group
