Plenary

This is the first week of plenary sessions in the parliament building, mostly today and yesterday, which means that there are a million people in the building and I have to carry my ID. Yesterday there was an event opening, right afterwards an appointment with the Ombudsman's office, to see if I should work there for a few days, and then the plenary session. It's interesting to watch--it's like Question Time, in that interruptions and heckling are allowed--but the topics, without background, can be a bit boring. The sessions continued on this morning with verbal questions, posed by representatives to the government, which has three days in which to prepare an answer. After the Question Hour is the Current Hour, in which questions are also answered, but these questions were submitted in another form and the government has had either three or six weeks to prepare an answer. On my way home for lunch yesterday I passed Kurt Beck on the street (Angela Merkel's Tony Blair; Bush's Gore would be a good analogy), coming from the House of Representatives/Ministry Building (where I live). In the plenary sessions I met a friend, whom I had met at the party, who is an intern with the SPD at the moment, and we went for coffee. Perhaps I'll do something with her and her friends from Speyer, as L. is in Paris for the weekend.

Friday there is an opening for the ''Travelling Exhibition'' about the parliament; it gets set up in variouos places in the state to educate people about democracy. Now it's in a school in the middle of nowhere, and the 10th graders have been shanghaied into being group leaders. Anyways, that means I am driving there and back on Friday. Monday is the ''Betriebsausflug'', the Work Field Trip, or however one could translate that. The entire civil service, with few exceptions, is going to tour a cloister from the 12th Century (where the Sean Connery movie ,,In the Name of the Rose'') was filmed, have a second breakfast somewhere, lunch somewhere else, and in the afternoon is a visit to a llama farm (didn't know they had them here.. I ended up explaining to someone what the difference between a llama and an alpaca ist) and a vinyard, with a wine tasting to follow. Should be fun. And they serve vegetarian food (our restaurant im Landtag offers a Meal du Jour or something similar, for €4, changes daily, and is always with meat. Everything else on the menu is €7-10.