Photo 1. CORE team
The third Core meeting in Tralee, Ireland started with the wind. The weather varied between sunshine, hails and stormy rain when the participants arrived at Tralee during Monday 10th February by train, plane and car – and happily without any unexpected delays. However, fireplaces in warm and charming The Meadowlands Hotel welcomed us with the Irish hospitality
The actual project meeting started in Tuesday 11th February in The Institution of Technology Tralee (North Campus). The hosts welcomed the participants and introduced The Institution with a tour in particularly HTC department. Then we had upgrade retrospect of the project with its achievements and difficulties by Mika and Oona followed overview of project evaluation, quality and dissemination situation of the moment (by Kristin, Sigrid and Iker).
We enjoyed lunch at the Ballygarry House with the picturesque landscape and wonderful “pure flavored” food made of local ingredients. Afterwards we had a change to explore the restaurant environment and the kitchen. Among other things the Ballygarry House is popular local Wedding venue for generations.
Photo 2. The Ballygarry House
The meeting continued with statements of learning materials implemented in the project focusing concepts of open badges. Among other things there was also an important task to make decisions of practical timetables of combined Competition and the Pop-up event. The First day of meeting brought up that we will still have lot of issues to deal with. Fortunately, we had another day to deal with things and Mika Heino closed the first official day of the meeting.
Photo 3. Sua Basque fusion by Gorka
The hosts had organized Basque fusion-style dinner at the Little Cheese Shop which worked as Pop-up restaurant SUA, indeed according to the theme of the CORE project. Conversations of the day continued in atmospheric space of Little Cheese Shop with interesting food combinations.
Photo 4. Pop Up restaurant SUA
During Wednesday 12th meeting we agreed on schedules of Pop-up event that would be realized in Espoo, Finland between 5th and 7th of October and the project final meeting 8th and 10th in Vaasa. We also had workshop on 360⁰ camera and ThingLink by Oona. This workshop cleared up finely functions of these tools. Excellent lunch and dinner were served by students at ITT.
Thursday was for tourism. We had a tour of Dingle organized by hosts. We visited Dingle town, Cheese Shop, Dingle Distillery and we also enjoyed delicious lunch at Dingle Cookery school. We also had opportunity to enjoy the magic scenery of Inch Beach and The Conor Pass. Drive down The Conor pass felt in the bottom of stomach of a poor tourist accustomed to right hand traffic and wide roads.
Photo 6. Dingle Cookery school
Windy Tralee, Ireland provided a great frame for third Core meeting which was important for the project`s progress. Many thanks for kindness and care to the hosts of ITT, especially for Kristin Brogan and TJ O´Connor. It was great to visit Stout´s homeland.
Janne Möhkölä, Senior lecturer, at Omnia