Balloons on Plateia Eleftherias (Place of Liberty)

 

Place:

Plateia Eleftherias which is at the entrance to the old city of Nicosia and opposite of the town hall. We chose this place because it is very central, near to the shopping zone and because a clock in front of the place counts the days until Cyprus enters the EU in may 2004 (146 days left on Dec, 6th). Not to forget the meaning of the word liberty.

 

Ingredients:

* 50 yellow and 50 blue balloons; hard work: after a whole day which we spent

* in the city centre of Nicosia without finding ANY balloons (close to resignation!), we were lucky to find a shop ONLY FOR BALLOONS in the last minute with approximately 1000 different sorts of balloons!

* Some posters saying "I want to decide about Europe" in Greek, English, French and German and posters of "democracy international"

* Leaflets with the ERC postcard

* A long cord and some cloth-pegs

* Many many interested people

 

Result:

* 50 blue and 5 yellow balloons on the cord; finding out that Cypriots are ashamed to blow balloons in public ;)(so we had to do this for them);

* the people most interested in European Affairs are young families with children and immigrants living in Cyprus;

* many Cypriots were interested if the Cyprus Problem will be solved after Cyprus will have joined the EU;

* many said that they want to join the EU as fast as possible to solve the Cyprus problem;

* many people were not convinced of the idea of referenda in every country.

* They think that most of the citizens are not interested so much in politics and that they don't know enough to vote in a referendum. Referenda will not raise citizens' political consciousness. They say a referendum about the constitution will not work as there will always be some aspects with which one agrees and some with which one doesn't agree lots of young people were not willing to talk to us because they - as they said - had to do shopping

* Many people were so not interested in the EU/European constitution that they didn't even want to take a yellow balloon!

* Citizens do not know anything about the European constitution!

 

Jeanette Ehrmann, Mathilde Salou, Pierre Gauvrit, Nicolas Gateaux