June 29

I woke up at 5.00 local time without any alarm clocks! That is one hell of an accomplishment. :)
Today I planned to visit (without prior notice) all Latvian MEPs. I had a small setback when I found out that most of them have the whole day busy at different group meeting and then all of them leave home this evening. After finding that out I changed the strategy a bit and gave all the revelant information to the assistants asking them to give it to the MEP and still to try to schedule a meeting with me today. It worked in some cases.
At first I was simply walking around and telling everyone how we would like to fix the directive using the "Buzek-Rocard compromise" amendments. After the lunch, Erik came up to me and asked to also collect MEP signatures on these amendments to table them. At first I went to Lansbergis from Lithuania and spend almost an hour convincing him to sign. In the end he was convinced and did the signing.
After that success I called the assistant of Andrejevs and asked if his MEP would have a few minutes to meet and sign the amendments. The assistant replied that Andrejevs liked the amendments and will sign them as soon as he gets back to the office. This one was easy :)
After that a call came from assistant of Girts Valdis Kristovskis saying that he will meet me at 17.00. I was very glad about getting the previose two signatures, but a bit discuraged by yesterdays talk with Krasts, who is in the same party as Kristovskis. To my surprise Kristovskis didn't mind that his party mate didn't agree with us - after 5-10 minutes of explanations, Kristovskis was ready to sign the amendments. That signature came as a pleasant surprise :)
All Latvian members of EPP followed Dombrovskis and Piiks and signed the amendments - I consider that a great success, especially as I didn't even have to ask them for that :D
After the very busy day at the Parliament I went to the FFII apartment to assess the Web. Me and Jan were there. We were late for the regular FFII status dinner at 20:00 which was taking place at my hotel - 20-25 minutes from the apartment. It was raining. I wanted to take a taxi, but Jan wanted to walk. We made a compromise - we would walk until we see a taxi, and that we'll take it. Unfortunately there was no taxi in sight untill we were 100 meters from the hotel. Doh.
Some bits of Chinese food and dinner talks later I went to bed. This was one of the hardes days in my short lobbying career :P