Juan Convers

The european union stats office publishes interesting statistics related to the acquisition of citizenship in the EU. Yesterday it was the anniversary of my Irish one, so I pulled out some stats related to the green island.

The first chart shows the increase in the number of new citizens from 2011, when the goverment streamlined the process of reviewing the applications, cutting a very important backlog.

---

The data has some additional information about the origin of the naturalised citizens both from the EU and Non-EU countries:

Living in Europe with an European passport defintively makes life way easier, so thank you very much Ireland.

I was thinking today that one year ago I was flying back to Europe after finishing my 6 months career break travelling in Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

I tried to document this experience on the road in: Breaksian.com. I was checking today some the interesting experiences I described there and I found these posts:

Visiting the Angkor Temple Complex by bike

Making new friends in the Jeju Island of Korea by playing the Piano:

Cruising the Halong Bay in a 1906 replica boat

Travelling from Bangkok to Penang in an overnight train:

Experiencing the Portuguese flavor in the Chinese Macau

enjoying the amazing Autumn Colors in Nara

Biking in the isolated Island of Zamami, off of the coast of Okinawa.

Or visiting Taiwan, and understanding the politicial and historical issue regarding China

I was such an amazing experience that I would definitively recommend it to anyone!

Last night when I was reading about the EgyptAir hijacking I was thinking that fortunately these type of incidents are now very rare. I remember when I was a kid that these was one of the cliches in the American movies of the 80's (ie. Delta Force), but with the tough security measures in place in most of the airports, this doesn't happen as often.

Wikipedia has a detailed compilation on the aircraft hijacking incidents and there is defintively a decrease compared to the peak on the 70s.

Wikipedia has a list of the terrorist incidents that happened during the current year. Based on this information those are the countries most affected by number of terror incidents:

Last weekend I visited Dublin for the 100th year anniversary of the Easter Rising, when Ireland started the process to become and independent republic. The city was absolutely packed as you can see in this picture taken at college green.

Next page