Hello, I am Joseph from Switzerland and I am in the EOTO group with Robbe from Belgium. =D
Our first meeting on the 24th of March is already quite long ago, but I remember it very well. The reason is that everything went wrong in the beginning. We wanted to meet at 16:00 in front of the Linna building at UTA but I had another meeting until 16:00 at TAMK. Thus, I was about half an hour too late! Fortunately Robbe was waiting patiently for me. But the next problem was not far: Due to the holiday week, the OASIS room at UTA, where we wanted to go, was closed. But we found a solution, the subway restaurant next to the Yliopistonkatu bus station. So finally, after about one hour delay our meeting started with a good sandwich.
At this meeting Robbe told me a lot about Belgium in general. Honestly, I didn’t know much about Belgium before – it was just some random country for me. But then I realized that there are many similarities with Switzerland. Especially, the cultural diversity – in Belgium are three official languages: Dutch, French and German. This leads to cultural borders between the regions. In Addition, there are also differences in the landscape between the region of Flanders and the region of Wallonia. This was new for me. I knew that there is a French speaking part because of Stromae but I didn’t knew that German is also an official language which is spoken in eastern Wallonia. Completely different from Switzerland is the political system in Belgium. It is very complicated with the King and all the different regions. Robbe told me that often even native Belgians hardly understand all the details. There are often two parliaments for one region: One parliament for the geographic region and one for the linguistic region. But not always – it is really very complicated. That’s the main point I remember about the political system in Belgium. Robbe told me also a lot about the elections in Belgium. An interesting fact for me is that you have to vote, it is mandatory. You can also be randomly chosen to help during the elections, like counting votes e.g. The last interesting fact I want to mention is the funny thing that Belgium is the country with the longest period of time without government worldwide! Even before countries like North Korea and so on and so forth.
We’ve been talking really long about the advantages and limitations of this system and ended our meeting around nine pm!
Thanks for reading 🙂
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