The goal of the Austrian Culture Week was to familiarise people with the culture, the language, the national cuisine, some famous landmarks and the music from Austria from the comfort of their own home.
This week was dedicated to all things Austrian. As it was still impossible to do physical events the whole week consisted of various online events. We kicked things off on Monday with a Strudl Cooking Class on Instagram, where people could watch a stream of one of our members preparing a traditional Austrian Strudl. The list of necessary ingredients was posted a few days earlier so people can get the all the groceries they need in order to cook alongside with us. On Tuesday we had some Social Media posts about recipes for other national dishes and Wednesday evening we featured a themed Online Pub Quiz about Austria. During the next day we published a playlist with famous and fun Austrian songs, covering everything from 70s Schlager music to 90s Falco and expanding to contemporary artists as well. At the beginning of the weekend, on Friday, we made a series of Social Media posts about famous landmarks and beautiful locations that you can visit in Vienna when taking a walk. We took great care to specifically choose rather unkown or remote locations as to avoid exposing international students to overcrowded areas which may have posed a health risk to them or others. On Saturday we organised a Austrian themed movie night with the Netflix Party App, where we watched the first two episodes of the Freud series. As a small surprise we then published a 45-minute special episode of our podcast "Home Alone with ESN Uni Wien", where we talk about Austrian culture and celebrities as well as different Austrian dialects and costums.
The Austrian Culture Week was a great hit with some caveats! Most social media posts caught a lot of attention with the one about famous locations being one of the most shared posts we have ever had. Our cooking class also had a fair number of participants, while the pub quiz and the online movie night did not gain a lot of traction. We did attribute this lack of participants to an increasing online event fatigue and to the fact that this was also the first week when restrictions were alleviated to a degree that you could go out and meet with small groups of people. The beautiful May weather probably added to this as well, as previous online events were usually frequented at a better rate. However, as mentioned before, the social media posts were unexpectedly well received and the podcast also gained a good amount of listeners throught the coming days. Also some international students did reach out and thanked us for our efforts in order to bring Austrian culture to them, at a time when they were unable to go out and experience it themselves. It also helped with rallying the section's members to a common cause and keeping the team spirit high. So overall, this has been a very successful week!