On Friday night I did something which I have never done before and that is go and see an Abba 'tribute' act. I was in Germany, no sorry Mallorca for a conference on Peer Mentoring where I was giving a talk about our VOCA Europe project adapting e-learning vocational training materials for disabled people.

It was a fairly interesting event which will probably lead to my institution making contact with at least one of the participants so that we can work more closely together in our current projects. For the organisers, that in itself counts as a success. But for me the best part was undoubtedly that a group of young mentors and mentees was invited along as well. We discovered what the peer mentoring process had meant  to them and the whole trip was obviously an experience which they will remember as a high point for a long time to come.

In the evening in one of the bars at the centre was the Abba tribute act who were not taking themselves too seriously. They then morphed into a Boney M tribute act. But I forgave them everything when they stayed on and joined in the dancing with mentors and mentees once the DJ took over from them. It was amazing to see these young people, some with severe learning difficulties, who the previous day had been tongue tied in front of us when asked to explain what they had been doing transformed into confident performers as they mimed to Tom Jones' 'Sex Bomb' wrapped in the Welsh flag and wearing the curly black wig from the Boney M performance.

Bringing along beneficiaries of the projects is very rewarding for all parties. I have seen this also with another network I am involved in where university students are frequently involved in organising and contributing to our meetings.

From an intercultural point of view however, the contrast with my recent trip to Leon in Northern Spain could not have been more stark. We were billeted in a very luxurious hotel complex with endless international food at all times of the day. I approached one of the young students who had come out to help the organisers to see whether he would be willing to do a podcast interview with me about his time in Mallorca. But when we tried to find out if anything had struck him particularly as different from Swansea, he was really stuck for words. So no joy there.

I have managed to produce a page in Fronter with a picture and links to other material stored there. This is much better than the list of folders I was originally faced with. How come I made such progress? Because the Fronter support team in the UK picked up on my comments here in Elgg and took the trouble to supply me with instructions on how to make better use of the interface. The page even contains a link to a discussion forum so I have managed to inject a bit of interactivity.

Now I feel a little guilty for moaning so publicly. I have been trying to work out why I got so stuck and I think the answer is that the teachers in the rest of my institution have not cottoned on to how to use Fronter effciciently. And as a beginner, my first instinct was to look at what other people had done. That turned out not be a brilliant idea when the examples visible to me were so unimaginative. I guess we could all do with an injection of inspiration as to how to make better use of Fronter.

I have just been asked to take on the coordinating of a Leonardo project, VOCA2,  at my institution. I knew that I was going to play a large role in it but this was a bit of a surprise. So now I need to take a close look at the application to see what we promised to deliver and work out the best way of getting the deliverables.

One of the priorities will be to get a useful website up and running so I cannot even provide a project weblink yet. The project revolves around the development of a mentoring program for the disabled to enable them to keep their jobs which in many cases are so hard-won and so easily lost.

The next milestone is a project meeting in Lisbon in June and I am hoping that we can facilitate a visit from another mentoring project with a partner in Lisbon which I learned about in the recent Mallorca conference I attended three weeks ago.

I learned today that my blog was shown as part of a talk by Eric Baber in Muscat yesterday which is kind of a spooky thought!

Actually I have no idea who sees this. I know that I could probably find a counter out there somewhere and maybe somehow incorporate it into a personal template but wouldn't it be so much easier if this could be incorporated as a standard part of the elgg blog?

I had set aside these last three days as intensive recording sessions for the new podcast venture I am involved in at www.absolutely-intercultural.com but have so far not done one recording. This is because I have had a cold for the last two weeks and right now am plagued by a dry cough which comes on especially when I am talking. Since I don't want to end up like the badger watching character in the Fast Show (UK) I guess I will just have to wait. Many people have agreed to contribute both complete strangers and old contacts which is encouraging. I hope they can be patient.

My father told me yesterday that Terry Wogan earns about £7m a year so I began to wonder if the BBC has a packet of wonder drugs they can give him if he ever gets a sore throat or a cough.

The mark of a good idea is often that many people  say 'Why hasn't this been done before?'. One such recently happened here in Denmark with a campaign called Vigitgt which, in Danish means important. The idea was simple; that a day should be set aside when Danes and newly settled Danes should meet each other in each others homes for dinner.

The day was April 22 and unfortunately the website http:www.vigtigt.dk ,developed in the run up to the event, has been pared down to a page of comments from participants. However all 5 programmes can currently be viewed on the Danish TV website at http://www.dr.dk/DR1/michellesmission/index.htm (of course they are in Danish).

I just watched the TV programme following the event and made the following notes:

'We should be called Danish. Full stop.' This in response to the Danish media habit of discriminating between so called new Danes and Liver Paté Danes (after the most common topping in Danish lunchboxes).

One of the Danes thought that when visiting New Danes from Lebanon there would be more carpets while the Lebanese (Danes) thought there would undoubtedly be more wood floors.

Strangely enough (to me) the Lebanese (Danes) thought the Danes wouldn’t take their outdoor shoes off indoors and strangely enough (to me because Scandinavians are renowned for taking their shoes off indoors and it has become a reflex action in our house also) the Danes did indeed have to be asked to take their shoes off. For the Lebanese (Danes) this was because the floor is a place where they pray and needs to be clean. There was an implication that the New Danes had higher standards of cleanliness than the old Danes (which surprised me as I have the impression that Danish houses are squeaky clean).

One of the participants said, as he was preparing to for his date, that this was more challenging than he’d imagined probably because these strangers were coming into his personal, private space.

The most surprising or uncomfortable sight (to me) was when one of the extreme rightwing People’s Party visited a family of New Danes and ended up ranting against immigrant parents who didn’t make sure that their children spoke Danish and ended up costing the Danish state a huge amount of money.

I was most jealous watching a group of Danes being entertained in a mosque with Pakistani food because that is the type of food I miss most in Denmark.

It was striking that the TV programme focussed almost exclusively on Muslims when there are many other traditions in the immigrant community.

I was also struck that the New Danes spoke much better Danish than me, one reason why I would never have made it into the final cut (apart from the fact that I am no type of Dane).

Finally I wondered why nobody noticed that it was OK for the organiser of the whole event to warn her guests about being mugged in Copenhagen as they left her house at the end of the evening. From one stereotype to another!

Lesson learned: It’s not so dangerous so just try it.