Netherlands in 3 days

It is not about Amsterdam, though it could be. Imagine all the clichés you can about that city… well, most of them are true. As random as a tourist can be, we managed to get in the first 5 minutes of our trip after arriving to the Amsterdam Central train station straight to the Red Light District… and no, it was not our primary objective, not only because I was really hungry but rather because it was obvious there were better things to do. The area has for sure a unique touch, and yes, you can smell weed everywhere, get lost in hundreds of coffee shops, or find a quite good looking girl… and if you consider it a way of having fun, buy one hour of her time… 1 square km2 (or more) of Amsterdam that made me realise how sad is some people’s life…

As we were trying to get out of there, we finally managed to arrive in the Dam square. We’ve started to walk trough the small streets with the canals that resemble Venice but they rather look like taken from a fairytale. We’ve realised that we have to pay attention to the bikers, which somehow drive like suicidal on the city streets… I guess they just want to get rid of the tourists but I cannot stop wondering how many bike related accidents are happening each day. We stood in Amsterdam 3 days trying to discover its real side, the people and the mentality that made that country such a liberal one. Obviously we got only the very end of the iceberg but I was surprise how this country resembles USA, or better said a combination between the easy going American lifestyle and the European way. We visited the Rijksmuseum (with an impressive collection of Rembrandt paintings, the Van Gogh Museum, we took boat ride on the channels and we got the chance to see the Golden Age houses of Amsterdam with their cozy apereance).

But beside all this, if there is something that I will always remember from the Netherlands, it will be the train trip from Amsterdam to Hague… with the country side looking like in Rembrandt painting: the channels, windmills and black & white cows... the North Sea with people surfing and docks…

Branding Romania

There happened a lot of great things for me recently. Most of them are not some that you necessarly want to share with the entire Internet comunity as I hardly believe they are ment to be enjoyed in a smaller circle. I am saying that somehow to motivate why the title of my blog this days is reffering to Branding our country rather then how I've been doing recently... the idea of Branding at a national level came to me last year when I was staying in US and it comes back to me now even stronger... It is so important, that I somehow thinK that I should dedicate it a big part of my blog, and I would like to start today.

Our country image abroad is in the best case unexistant. In the worse case, it is a very negative one, and it is like this not because we stood hepless in front of time and space, but because this is how we marketed our nation. And for this we have used all the methods posible, for the last 50 years.People. Media.Our own belief...

It is really sad to write all this, but each day staying here I realise how terible we are in selling an image of a country which economicaly is not that far away from Hungary, Slovakia or Poland,culturaly and spiritually reach... why did we have the bad chance of being the black ship of Europe (or one of 2-3 of them)? Is this image reflecting reality? How can we improve it?