Boredom

So, it is not 3:35 pm in Bonn and in less than 4 hours I will be on a train back home to Heidelberg.  I would like to tell you that I’m surrounded by a flurry of activities and concluding negotiations, but in fact, most of today has been spent waiting around for plenaries to start and occasionally attending an NGO meeting.  I arrived at the Maritim Hotel at 9:45 am, an hour and 45 minutes before the first plenary session of the day was about to start.  I spent that time checking my email, blogging, and meeting with some other youth delegates and reported to the Saal Maritim plenary room shortly 11:30 when the plenary was scheduled to begin. And waited for it to begin.  And waited.  And waited.  Until someone from the Secretariat said that the plenary had been postponed until 12:30.  Okay.  That gave the youth delegates an opportunity to meet up and get some lunch.  Not necessarily a bad thing.

At 12:30 I showed up at Saal Maritim once again only to be informed that the plenary had been canceled and that the concluding plenary would convene at 3 pm.  Off I headed to do some more email checking and news reading before the Climate Action Network (CAN) meeting at 2.

Okay, so at 3 I (along with a bunch of other CAN members) showed up at the Saal Maritim once again and it is now 4 pm and there are no signs that the plenary is starting anytime soon, although I did receive a letter from the Polish delegation about the plane crash that took the life of many important people including the Polish President Lech Kaczynski (my sincere condolences go out to all the families and friends of those who died).

So what have I been doing with me time?  Well, I would like to tell you that I’ve been super productive and meeting with politicians or journalists, but that is not true as the few that are here are nowhere to be seen.  Instead, I have been reading vegan and vegetarian cooking blogs, thinking about what book I would like to read next, and studying for a placement exam that I am taking on Thursday.  And getting frustrated that politicians, negotiators, and diplomats view addressing anthropogenic climate change as something without a deadline or real life consequences.  A topic of so little importance that it does not even require meeting your own deadlines or being on time.

I want to trust in the policy process, I really do. But it’s so hard when your time is being wasted even after you made the effort to travel 3 hours from your house to take steps towards providing solutions to the global climate crisis.  United Nations, I really do want to have faith and trust in your abilities to tackle international issues, but you’re not making it very easy right now.  So I’m going to stave off my boredom by reading about vegan sushi.

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