During the summer of 2004, I spent three weeks travelling through the Baltic states and Scandinavia. It was one of the highlights of my life thus far, not in the least because I could tick off several boxes of my should-do-once list: visiting the former Soviet Union, experiencing midnight sun, sleeping on night trains.

Upon coming back home, I started to plan my next holidays, during which I was going to travel through central and eastern Europe. Several times I went to the local bookshop, to browse the Lonely Planet to Eastern Europe — the one with the men playing chess in a pool on the front cover — and to make plans in my head.

Life had different plans with me though and these didn’t involve spending summers on my own. Many times did I resist the different path life was taking, even if I had chosen that path myself, but ultimately I was and still am very happy with the way things went.

This week we spent in Budapest. I had the best time of my life. Not because of the things I could check off my lists — although there were some of these too — but because we stayed in an awesome hotel in a great city, met great people, didn’t feel like we had to do anything and everything was just right.

On Thursday, the day before we flew back home, we spent several hours in the Széchenyi thermal bath. Just before we left I saw a few men playing chess in one of the pools. At the exact same place as the men on the Lonely Planet guide.

The world is such a great place.

In one of my earliest childhood memories, I am riding my tricycle through our living room. In the background, my dad is concentratedly watching the Tour de France on TV; or he would have been if it hadn’t been for me constantly shouting “Tour de France! Tourtourtour!” at the top of my lungs.

The Tour de France, in case you don’t know, is the world’s biggest cycling race, where about 200 riders spend three weeks in July riding 200km a day through France and occasionally its surrounding countries. I was a massive Tour de France fan as a child and spent many hours in my room, reading books about the history of the race and, especially, studying long lists of results.

Of course, like any Dutch boy, I also fantasised about riding the Tour myself, ignoring the fact that even then I knew how I lacked any kind of talent for any kind of sport. In those dreams the Tour, which had visited the Netherlands just a handful of times, always passed through the area where I lived. They were dreams after all.

Yesterday, the 97th Tour de France started. In Rotterdam, a few yards from the hospital I was born in. That is a nice little fact. Today, however, the first proper stage passed through the town I grew up in; the route included many roads that I’ve rode on thousands of times, including most of my daily route from home to school. That is still a bit surreal.

When Dimitra mentioned on Friday night that we hadn’t voted I had almost forgotten. Of course I knew that I never went to the polling station and ticked the box next to one of the local candidates. But we had become so absorbed by the elections and everything that followed that it felt like we had voted.

I was slightly disappointed with the election result. I had hoped for the Liberal Democrates to win a dozen seats or more; not to see them actually lose a handful. Especially since they see their popular vote increased by gain one per cent. And that’s not even the most ridiculous part of the electoral system: the party won 23% of the votes, but will occupy less than 9% of the seats in the House of Commons.

Still, I am mostly happy. These elections have ‘change’ written all over them. For a start, none of the parties won an absolute majority, not even in parliamentary seats, and thus two or more parties will have to form a coalition, a rare occurance in British parliamentary history. With the Lib Dems a likely participant in a government of a yet undefined colour, electoral reform may be possible; 62% of people have said they favour ‘a more proportional system of voting’.

It is interesting then to see many people calling Nick Clegg a betrayer for even daring to speak with conservative leader David Cameron. One of the consequences of a system of proportional representation is that parties are unlikely to win an absolute majority and thus two or more parties will have to agree on a coalition government. If Clegg had not started negotitions with the conservatives, it would have been selling out his party’s principles.

The idea of a government made up of two (or more!) parties seems to be a rather scary idea to many Brits. Before we know the country will end up like Greece. Actually, in the Greek electoral system the biggest party gets 40 bonus seats, to make sure they will have an absolute majority in parliament. On the other hand, in the Nordic countries, Germany and the Netherlands, governments have been coalitions for decades. Lack of stability is not an often heard criticism of these countries.

A political system that is likely to result in coalition governments would also make campaigns more about why your own ideas are supposedly good rather than why the others’ are bad. There will be fewer personal attacks and fewer scaremongering; fewer if you vote them thens because if you vote us, you may end up getting them too. And that them may be the party you hirtherto saw as your main rival, as is the case in the current talks between conservatives and Lib Dems. (A lot of dislike for conservatives, to put it mildly, can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher; whatever you think of her, she would never have been able to act so ruthlessly in a coalition government.)

Democracy isn’t ideal, as many have pointed out, but it works quite well and certainly better than any known alternative. One of its strongest principles is the idea that people together make a better decision than one person on their own. This too works for parties in a government; it can work even in the UK.

There will be elections in the UK tomorrow. I am not allowed to vote as I don’t hold a British passport. That may be slightly unfair; after all I am part of this society. But there are many things that are a lot more unfair — for example, the fact that people from many other countries aren’t allowed to enter this country like I did — so I’m not going to complain about that.

I have been following the campaign quite well — the Guardian’s daily podcast has been an excellent and only mildly biased source — and it’s interesting to see how things are different compared to the Netherlands. The thing that shocked me the most is how much effort is made to scare voters about the possibility of an opponent becoming a prime minister (‘Gordon will steal your pension’ ‘David will jeopardise the economy’ ‘Nick will make you feel less secure’). I enjoy following politics to a certain extent and I really like elections, but I’ve always thought of them as something positive: a chance to change things around, to make things better than they are.

There are many things that I think would change this country for the better; fairer taxes, more cooperation within Europe and less bureaucracy in education to name a few. For these reasons, the Liberal Democrats would get my vote if I had one to give; their campaign has also been the most positive of the three major parties. But most of all, I want there to be a hung parliament so that politicians are forced to work with rather than against each other and, ultimately, will change the electoral system. Until then, we ought to hope for positive changes, but shouldn’t forget that we ourselves can make these changes happen as much as the politicians can.