Day 7

Our group is in the workshop of “Borrowed Identities”. We are exploring the Irish culture by turning our identities into an Irish and also helping others to understand Irish culture by sharing personal experiences. How to become Irish? First we have prepared a questionnaire about the Irish culture and harvest as much information as possible from our experts, Achill’s locals. We asked about their traditions, education, language, stereotypes, behaviour, symbols, proverbs, and etc. This information and symbols of typical Irish culture and identity will be expressed through representative pictures. The pictures will help us to understand their culture and to act like them. On the presentation on Friday we are going to show our results through visualising cultural differences. In our country we will be the ambassadors of our experience about being Irish, for example, to be open-minded, funny (having craic in the pub), friendly, relaxed, courteous, family oriented, having time for each other, donate. This experience teaches us to find the information by direct contact with the people.

Marcia & Immaculada (German group)

It was four days ago that one of us, a fearless German warrior of considerable height pointed out in his speech, that he was glad to see our virtual community turning into a real one. Walking in a catering manager's shoes, that statement would probably refer to the emerging of an organic microeconomic entity, something we shall call a 'Multi-cottage Model'.
We have to assume, that the basic principles of catering at Keel turned all student members of our multicultural group into profit-seeking, optimizing, bartering beasts driven by their primary needs. After organizing the initial equal distribution of food purchased at the local store, we decided to run community supplies in 'laissez faire' style, and the outcome we have is simply frightening. After a few days of permanent complaining and crying for more goods, people gradually developed methods of spontaneous redistribution of goods, which – including bartering, free trade mechanisms and bribery – pushed our Multi-cottage Model towards the achieving of an optimal allocation of resources. It was just amazing to see how quick the complaints and growing needs disappeared in the lack of any specific response action from the management's side.
Yet, our model has still a lot to improve: in spite of the spontaneous balancing mechanisms based on geographic and social factors, we could hardly deal with the problem of workshop-hosting cottages' black hole attitude regarding consumers' goods.
To sum up, we thank Achill Cliff House for their help to prevent Achill Island from the violent riots of neobarbarian intercultural hordes frustrated by blank spaces in the very bottom of Maslow's pyramid. We must have saved at least a hundred Achill sheep. Or maybe two hundred. Thousands? Anyone?

Dávid (Hungarian group)