Four years ago Filip Dawidzinski posted his very first online podcast under the name Nie tylko dla orlów (‘Not only for eagles’ – referring to Poland’s national emblem). It was the start of what’s become a very popular series among Poles in Ireland and beyond, but it all began by chance.
“One day I was playing with iTunes and I discovered the podcast option,” he recalls. “I googled it and discovered a few podcasts done by Polish people. I liked the idea. I learned how to do it, and after four or five months I published mine.”
Since then, Dawidzinski posts a new recording online at least once a week. He takes his microphone almost everywhere he goes to record on the fly, later editing and adding music.
“Many of my podcasts are about my travels,” he explains. “Nothing spectacular, mainly around Europe. I talk about what I see and hear.”
Though Dawidzinski is modest about what he does, the attraction of his quirky adventures in audio is obvious.
“In San Francisco I took a night walk around the city. Pitch black, I didn’t know where I was going. The tramping of my feet was very loud, I wasn’t sure if I my voice would be heard in the recording!”
A good number of his podcasts are about Ireland. “I recorded one of my best programmes two years ago during the St Patrick’s Day parade,” he says. “I talked to participants getting off the buses after the parade – where they were from, what their costumes represented, what they thought, how they see things.”
Dawidzinski’s world travels have given him an opportunity to meet other immigrants and to compare views on emigration and on life.
Once, at a party in Düsseldorf, he garnered the responses of Polish emigrants to media reports that Poland’s President Kaczynski had called emigrants ‘losers’.
“They didn’t feel losers,” he says. “The majority left because of the economic situation, but with time they started to live full lives in their new countries, looking for opportunities, for self development. Most of them are happy with their lives.”
Dawidzinski is also very active among Ireland’s Polish community. He is an art director for the Forum Polonia group, and tries to record important moments in the community’s life such as their involvement in the local and European elections last June, or the visit of European parliament head Jerzy Buzek.
Forum Polonia has a wide variety of volunteers who do many different things. he says. “I try to show it by audio.”
Dawidzinski’s four-year podcasting anniversary also coincides with the fifth anniversary of his arrival in Ireland.
“I climbed the career ladder here,” he laughs. “I worked in a kitchen before I got employed as a graphic designer… Also during those first months I met my best friends here.”
Friends are important to Dawidzinski – and he has made even more through his online hobby.
“In 2006 we organised a get-together of Polish diaspora podcasters in Amsterdam. About seven people came from Holland, Germany and Ireland. It’s funny to realise how well we know each other thanks to listening to our podcasts.
“I also have made friendships with listeners,” he says. “Sometimes a programme inspires people to do something, do similar things, visit the same places.”
On a visit to the United States, he produced a podcast a day, mostly to keep his girlfriend informed of his travels.
“A woman e-mailed me one day saying that she was travelling to the States shortly after and the places I described in my podcasts sounded interesting. Then we started to exchange more e-mails and we eventually met.
“I felt a bit wired, cause she and her boyfriend seemed to know me so well…”
