Conference Socialising

This conference has been testing even my stamina. You really do start drinking before lunch and carry on until well after midnight.

This is some of our Baltic friends in the international vip room. We were toasting agreement that Lithuania and New Zealand should host each other for fact finding missions 🙂

Some of the wonderful and friendly staff from the International Office of the Party.

Our colleagues from Uganda. They were very up on NZ politics and teased me non stop on “Mrs Helen Clark” being re-elected Prime Minister.

And again our Baltic and Slavic friends. Was fascinating talking to the Foreign Minister of Bosnia on one side and some of the Serbian reps. Things are a lot better now. Fairly amusing story about Serbian and Croatian languages. Up until the war it was really one serbo-croat language but with some differences. Afterwards they insisted they were different languages and would, for example, insist that if someone appeared on Serbian TV speaking Croatian, putting sub-titles on. This would be the equivalent of the BBC having sub-titles for American speakers 🙂