Thursday, November 14, 2013

Week 46; a visitor from Poland!


This week we got a visitor from Poland to tell us about herself and her country to the people in my discussion groups. We got a lot of information on Poland and its people, Polish customs and holidays, and different places of interest.

Our guest, Maria, also told us about an ongoing campaign to promote Poland, which is called Come and complain. The idea behind this campaign is to tell (foreign) people about Poland and remarkable Polish people in a new way. This campaign doesn't emphasize how beautiful the country is or how many prominent scientists, composers, engineers, directors etc. the country has produced. On the contrary, the campaign focuses on something Polish people are apparently very good at: complaining. If they introduce for instance Marie Curie and say that the was the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize, and that she actually won two of them (in physics and chemistry!), they immediately complain about  it saying: what, only two? The same style goes on and on complaining about beautiful buildings, famous people, natural sites and all sorts of things. Naturally, you might argue that using this kind of inside joke as a marketing gimmick might be dangerous since not everyone understands jokes the same way, but in my opinion this campaign is a refreshing idea! Actually, I think that also us Finns use a lot of self-irony and we find it hard to praise ourselves, so at least I understood the jokes in the examples Maria showed us, and I thought they were hilariously funny! In fact, I went on Facebook today and found this campaign there as well, and of course I pressed the I like -button quite a few times!


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