Second day on Achill Island: Intercultural E-Business Workshop

We started this afternoon brainstorming about how to find the best way to present the items on the Internet platform eBay. We spent some time thinking about the logistics of the shipment and the costs for that .

Afterwards we repeated our main goals which we had determined in our first session.
Our first goal is to sell as many items as possible (our own items as well as the items that we will get from the locals) with the best possible outcome. The money we will earn trough our auctions will be donated to the local kindergarten on Achill Island. It is our plan to buy toys and other useful things for the children.

Guido (our group leader) who did an internship on Achill about two years ago is our “insider”. He has made it possible for us to address a lot of people that he knew from before this project, like for example the owner of the IT centre.

Our second goal is to sell about five paintings from Sean Cannon through ebay. We are just not sure which is the best eBay to choose Germany, Ireland or UK. But, we will probably pick ebay Ireland because we think that it makes more sense to sell Sean Cannons pictures to people who actually know the island.

We have had to deal with some challenges like downloading a software that we needed to prepare our auctions offline in advance to save online time which is kind of limited on the island.

But all in all we are making steady progress with our work and are very confident that we will achieve our goals as expected.

Mattias Göring

What are the stereotypes that come to our mind when we think of our own culture (autostereotypes)? What are the ones that foreigners confront us with (heterostereotypes)? Is there common ground between the two? And how can we test the so-called “second-degree stereotypes” – what we think that others think about our culture?

Alexandra’s seminar involved all participants in active exploration of what the main stereotypes are and how much truth we can find in them. Are Germans really those hard-working punctual pedants who value discipline more than a sense of humour? Are people from Lancashire all alike and is this why Dorothy had to emigrate? ;-)

As the classification of the different groups was done by homogeneous national groups, the analysis showed clearly that different nationalities seem to attribute different qualities to the same nationality. For example, the English may be perceived as a nation of tea-drinkers by the non-tea drinking Spanish people, whereas Lithuanians point out that the English drink their tea with milk (which Lithuanians don’t). This means that even if there is always a grain of absolute truth in the heterostereotypes they also clearly carry the stamp of the nationality that uses the stereotypes.

In this context it is interesting that stereotypes concentrate on differences which, seen from a distance, may appear very small; but in defining identity, differences seem more helpful than commonalities, of course.

Another positive feature was that people were moving around in the room – interacting with each other in a multicultural group and enjoying themselves!

Buíochas do Alexandra and the participants! Very interesting, indeed!

Laurence Borgmann

The Writing Workshop - Day 2, the 9th of February

The group met up in the morning to figure out what our story and the poem is going to be about. Yesterday we decided that we are going to write something about Captain Boycott and today we came up with some more characters. To make the story interesting we have decided that we are going to pick famous people from the history of Achill and make the story around them.
We started with an intercultural brainstorming, where we all came up with ideas for the story. There were a lot of laughing going on because we came up with so many silly things.

The beginning of the story:
A couple of students are visiting Achill on an intercultural project. When they are at the pub a man comes in and tells them about the old story of Achill Islands...It is raining, it is dark and the only thing that you can hear is the strong wind..

During our workshop we took a couple of photos as well. After the meeting Daniela and Johanna went to Margaret Cannon who gave them a couple of Irish books. Today we are going to read some Irish novels to be able to start writing our novel first thing tomorrow morning.

Julia Randow

Sunday afternoon. Reluctantly, we walked out of the Cliff House after Laurence told everyone to take a walk to the beach. I mean, what is a walk on the beach when you can clean up and carry tables after the reception ;-)
Anyway, we strolled the few hundred meters down to the stony beach and me among others saw what we thought were seals in the water (this is the second time I got fooled as I thought the same when we were here in 2000). The seals turned out to be brave Irish surfers (yes, this time, too!) and I felt the urge to talk to them.

After a quick run along the beach I reached the two surfers who had come out of the not-so-warm February Atlantic. They first thought I was a weird stalker, but as soon as I mentioned "Intercultural exchange project" they went "ahaaaa...". They had already heard the rumour about the European invasion of Keel.

After a while (I had already taken pictures of the brave two, which means I must be a really fast runner) the rest of the group came too see these Irish Hang-Teners. It turned out that Anna was very interested in one of the surfers feet, why we do not yet know... she might have a thing for rubbered feet!

They told us that they had been in for four (!) hours, and they did not seem at all affected by that. I did not dare ask how their hobby affected their family treasure...

Before we said goodbye to the wet ones, we got a phone number to a man who has surfboards for lease, so who knows... In a day or two we might be in the not-so-warm water trying to catch a wave... probably resulting in colds for all participants...

Magnus Olofsson