Ok, today was pretty crazy and I could probably write for quite a while about all the incredible people I met today. Today was the first day of a 3 day conference that my friend signed me up for. He is studying political science and his faculty is hosting an international conference. The conference is going to culminate on Friday with a plenary session modeled after one from the European Parliament.
Although I know very little about European politics I joined because I thought it would be a good way to meet people from all around Europe. In fact it has been great. In my meeting in the morning I was with mostly Italians, but many of them were studying in other Universities like Rome, Torino and Bolgnia. The meeting in the morning was to discuss our committees position on the issue at hand. The group of 15 students which I’m part of is dealing with climate change. For the first 15 minutes we listened to a teacher tell us all the important facts, about the different green house gases and the ones which were left out of the Kyoto protocol. The basic storyline is we are all going to die and the E.U. has to figure out how to impose its restrictive policies on the rest of the world. China and the U.S. were described as the enemies, but unfortunately rather formidable obstacles.
During the next meeting I met with my political party. I was assigned to the EPP (European People’s Party) which is self described as center right. Regarding environmental politics at least it very much resembles are left, but on other issues it is very different. We discussed a whole host of problems ranging from the financial crisis in Greece to the problems in Iran and also the negative effects of how the media portrays women. This group was very interesting because it was much more diverse, both ideologically, but also geographically. I met several students from Spain, one from Georgia, one from Scotland, and another from Bulgaria. The Bulgarian was actually fantastic and took me back to his room after where he presented me with a souvenir from his country. Additionally, he gave me quite a bit of a Bulgarian bread (Banitza) to try, which I will do tomorrow morning.
Oh, did I mention I also gave a guided tour of the Ducal Palace. Because all these students were from all over the world the group that organized this event wanted to show them around. However, because they couldn’t get anyone better qualified they brought their Italian friend to give the tour. Although he was studying English literature he knew very little about the Palace and was just going to translate out of the Guide book. It was at this point that I stepped in and offered to help out. From this point on I led the tour which lasted about 20 minutes. No one fell asleep, or through tomatoes, so I guess it was a pretty good day.
