“April 2010 is my first celebration of our national day in Romania, our so called Queen’s day. This year we celebrate 30 years of Queen Beatrix’s reign, which we all feel is quite an achievement.

Queen’s day is also an occasion to present the country’s “visit card” to the local authorities, your interlocutors, and colleagues in the diplomatic corps.

I have been on post in Romania for about eight months now. My first months were sort of exploring the new ground. I knew little about Romania, only what I had read and what I was told.

What I read: history and promising travel guides, proved to be very close to the truth. I learnt quickly though that Romania is a dynamic and quite complex nation, which means that the story of a book needs to be verified on a regular basis.

What I was told, to my view, did often not match reality. The reality was much more pleasant and positive!

My stay will be for 4 years and in order to be effective, this is the time one needs for a country as large and as complex as Romania to have a useful posting.

One of my first intentions was and still is to try and master your language. It is a friendly language and Romanian people are extremely helpful in trying to understand you, so this should not be too hard a task.

My second objective is to become familiar with the geography and ethnic diversity of your country. This means visiting many counties, the main cities and becoming acquainted with its people and habits. I had the opportunity to admire some of them (Timisoara, Brasov, Cluj, Constanta), but there are still many to go. This second objective is somehow hampered since I was assigned a temporary task by my government last February, which made me travel (much) to Belgium lately. But as from next month there will be enough time and definitely interest from my side to remedy this and go around Romania again.

The third objective I set myself is to enhance our commercial and cultural cooperation.

Our commercial/agricultural cooperation is extensive and intensive and covers many areas. But many is never good enough and we need and wish to increase this. The horticulture and logistic events of April 28 (see below) are an illustration of this effort. The opening of two new honorary Consulates (Constanta and Cluj) this year, is a second illustration; and other activities will undoubtedly follow.

As for cultural cooperation, obviously our funds are limited but our enthusiasm is large, and with limited funds and good cooperation with the Romanian embassy in the Netherlands, we manage to reach many promising Romanian artists and to create bridges between Dutch and Romanian artistic fields e.g. in architecture and graphic design.

In the political arena, we follow closely the progress of Romania into the EU’s lap and shall be helpful where and when we can. In the past, the Netherlands has been a privileged partner of Romania: through a very large number of so called MATRA projects, our public sector together with Romanian counterparts achieved many objectives related to your country’s EU integration. We hope to further build on this cooperation in many fields (justice, police, and various ministries) to strengthen our mutual basis for bilateral cooperation.

In this framework, we also hope to celebrate visibly our 130 years of diplomatic cooperation further this year.

Queen’s day is usually celebrated on April 30, but I wish to give each celebration a special character. This year the characteristic is trade and horticulture. We therefore combined the Queens’ day celebration with two special events to take place on April 28, that both illustrate our main area of activity in this large EU country, namely trade and agriculture/horticulture:

A day of activities is organised by the European Gateways Platform in the field of trade and logistics. It encompasses a seminar, exchange of trade experiences and match making and takes place on April 28, in the Crown Plaza Hotel. It emphasises the advanced knowledge and position of Dutch enterprises in anything that has to do with logistics, be it intermodal transport, storage, insurances, inland waterway networks, management of bulk transport, etc.

Also on April 28, the first open national flower arrangement contest is organised, this one in the Radisson Hotel. We expect a large number of the most reputed flower shops to participate and we are all looking forward to seeing the results being exposed during the celebration of our national day.

Altogether, I’d like to conclude by stating that I feel very welcome in Romania and hope that in time I shall be able to state that, in one way or another, the embassy has been instrumental in enhancing our ties further in a fruitful way.”