Hot, Hot, Hot

The days we have spent in Bucharest have been very hot. It has been a little over 100 the last couple of days. Coming from Istanbul, I didn't see a problem the first couple of days. However, it has been really hot on Monday and Tuesday. We fly to Munich, where it will be 66 tomorrow. It will be nice to get on the plane and land in a cooler climate.

This is as hot as it has been in Bucharest for the last 60 years, and yesterday the temp here was hotter than several cities in Africa. The average June temp in Bucharest is 68, so this is a big change for them.

We have had meetings over the last couple of days and usually dinner is with a European fellow from Bucharest. We always have very interesting conversations with the Europeans that have been to the States. Yesterday lunch was at Pizza Hut. I can say it was not much different that if we were in Billings, except the restaurant was a lot nicer and the menu had a few less choices. It was still a slice of life from home for all of us.

Today we visited the Palace of the Parliament. It is a very grand building. The Parliament is in the last week of their session, so people are quite busy. They were up late last night and will be up late again tonight. They may even go into special session if they can't reach a compromise this week. Sounds like the Montana legislature.

The politics over hear is still quite different. They are fairly new to politics as they have only had it since about 1990. A lot of people still run for Parliament because they can make money. They have no interest in serving, only lining their pockets. It makes it difficult to do the things they need to do to move their government and economy ahead. But like I said before, they are making progress and we always seems to forget in the States how long it takes us to make any real change. Our time line for fixing Social Security is much longer than that reform would take in Romania. They have a pension crisis looming and I would bet they fix theirs before we fix ours. Anyway, here is a link to some info on the palace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Parliament