Am back after my two-week trip to Romania. It was a great mission with a nice team and a reasonable meeting schedule. Sometimes, these trips have four to five meetings per day with no time for lunch, and there is little choice but to spend the entire evenings following up on all your other work and to do the writing for the mission reports. But not this time. Even if we had a couple of commitments also in the evenings, the meeting schedule had a nice pace. Except the trip to Brasov, there was however little time to see anything but the closest surrounding of the hotel we stayed at, and the view from the car on our way to various offices (mainly the Ministry of Agriculture’s, that of its project team, and our own office. I can add that the the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Rural Development sits in the by far most beautiful ag-ministry building I have ever been in!) So I did not have a chance to explore Bucharest, which was a  bit unfortunate since I was looking forward to seeing the ‘old town’ this time. But since we had a meeting at the Ministry of Finance, at least I got a glimpse of Ceausescu’s palace, which was right across the street. Hopefully, I will be back in Bucharest again in not too long – Romania is really becoming one of my favorite countries!

Me in front of the palace after our meeting at the Ministry