7/14/11- European Parliament Visit

Needless to say, getting up this morning was a little rough after the festivities from yesterday. Leaving the hotel in somewhat of a hurry we made it to the European Union Parliament around 8:30AM for a presentation and tour. In the presentation we learned about how the EU functions and were given some interesting statistics on the parliament member countries and their representatives. Apparently, Turkey is on the list of candidates to be accepted into the EU along with Iceland and Croatia. Our speaker mentioned that it may be another twenty years before Turkey is ready to join the union. On the other hand, Iceland and Croatia will probably become members of the union within the next two years, making the total number of EU members twenty-nine. We were shown the parliament room, had lunch and spent the second half of the day with another employee of the EU whose main focus was on heading EU financial reform. There are still a couple hours left in the day and I'll take advantage of this time to try to wrap up some other assignments.

I'm looking forward to the free day tomorrow!