Monday 23 November 2009

22nd of November: elections in Romania

[Post published by Liviu on Liviu's [in Netherlands] Blog]


22nd of November

Romanians had quite a busy day yesterday, on 22nd of November, since they had to vote 3 times:
First, decide the new President.
Second, decide whether to put pressure (or not) on the Parliament to switch from the current 2 chambers organization into an 1 chamber organization.
Third, decide again whether to put pressure (or not) on the Parliament to lower the number of MPs from the current 471 to at most 300.

I am a constant voter. I like voting. I see it as my duty to enforce democracy. So I had to go to the Hague to express my opinion.

I got up a bit too late, i.e. 2 hours later than I planned due to oversleeping and Amsterdam rain.
I missed one train (7 seconds should have I arrived earlier I would have caught the doors open). Well, I entertained myself by making 2 videos and some pictures with trains comig and going from Amsterdam Lelylaan.
Luckily these trians come every half an hour and I eventually arrived at The Hague.

I decided to navigate to the embassy in my classic style: having the map cached in the brain (funny language, right?) due to the reading done the previous night and cross-checking the paper map and Nokia map (on my cell phone) very rarely.

It was an entertaining 55 minutes walk in a completely unknown city. Now, after completing it, the path looked like this: Rijnstraat, Koninginnengracht, Javastraat, Scheveningseweg, Adriaan Goekplaan, and finally the little street not shown on any map on the right of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons building.


View Amsterdam (by Liviu) in a larger map

The Romanian Embassy looked really nice. I liked it. It felt like home.

There was quite a long line of people anxious to vote. Luckily there were a few friends already in line, so I skipped some 10-15 minutes of staying in line. Overall, I waited 50 minutes outside in the blistering cold (ok, I admit to not have been that cold). There were another 2 shorter queues in the embassy corresponding to the 2 voting rooms, so we had to wait another 20 minutes inside the embassy. Yes, voting is a demanding task.

Once we finished we took a picture to celebrate the moment.


23rd of November

Now, on 23rd of November, the outcome of the elections annoys me a little since Mr. Basescu and Mr. Geoana shall compete in the second round to become President of Romania. I generally agree with the results for the reorganization of the Romanian Parliament, although I prefered the 2 chambers style; indeed, a decrease in the number of MPs seemed terribly necessary.



Note: I shall provide a link to the Picassa album at a later time. Yes, there are several albums many people patiently wait for, so bare with me some more time. Thank you for your patience!

Friday 20 November 2009

First haircut, first post

[Post published by Liviu on Liviu's [in Netherlands] Blog]

I've had on Wednesday my first haircut in the Netherlands, so I decided it was a great time to have my first blog post, too. Hopefully, there shall be other posts before my second haircut.