Carbon trading? Not on my watch.

In an effort to cash in on the golden age of buget air travel, before those meddling politicians ruin everything, I have booked a flight to Croatia for this weekend. We found a really really good deal, and since accomodation down there is cheap, and the weather here is utterly terrible, and the weather there is apparently unusually marvellous, it was an easy decision.

Other than that, my main briefs this week have been examining food additives. We had a meeting with officials from Coca-Cola today, and heard their opinions on this topical matter. Very fascinating. I have also participated in a meeting about how factory farmed chickens are causing large numbers of new flu strains to appear, and that this really isn't a good thing. The MEPs are going to ask a question to the commission.

Random events in Belgium

I had a fairly busy weekend. On Friday they suddenly made me do a report on the new Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme for airlines, to brief up JB on Monday. So that kept me busy all day. Then we went out to the festivale de musique on Friday. Back to the Clemenceau market on Saturday. I even managed to score a free flat of Mangoes, and an avocado. Pretty good day after that. We ate at my usual haunt down there, and it was better than usual. More musique that night... next day off to a Shakespeare festivale somewhere in Wallonia with an Italian girl CnM know who drove like a true native. Then to Namur for the evening, which we never realised was so hilly! Then back to Brussels for the St. Jean Baptiste celebrtions held by the Québec mission. Truly a slice of Quebecois culture with poutine and St. Ambroise. Then back to work, where I had to go to a session of the "ENVI" commitee and listen to all the MEPs trying to destroy air travel as we know it.

Security

Brussels is a fortified camp right now, as all of Europe's heads of state have descended on us. Its actually a serious annoyance. They have completely closed off our closest metro station, with barbed wire no less, and we can't cross the street in town, without going on a huge detour. Not only that, the police are proving to be unusually officious, and they criticized my bike riding! Hopefully the Council can get their business over with soon!

Bicycle

Not sure if I wrote that I bought a new bicycle... or a used one anyway. I decided not to buy a stolen one, and had to pay an extra premium for that, but it was still quite cheap. It only has one gear, but it rides quite well. I went out to the outskirts of town yesterday, and then back in to the centre. Brussels seems quite nice for that - it really isn't all that big. Work continues as usual... its been pretty laid back, yet plenty of work to do, so it has been enjoyable. I'm not looking forward to the return of the MEPs next week. They seem to stress everyone out. I will probably go to the Strasbourg session in July. The Canadian interns have started a tradition of meeting at Place du Luxembourg every Thursday, so that is on the program for tonight.

Mid week

Not much going on. I'm pretty busy at work this week, despite, or perhaps because the parliament is meeting in Strasbourg this week. They're kind of letting me do my thing more, which means I don't constantly have to ask what to do next. Here's a pic I took when I randomly woke up at sunrise, and couldn't sleep any more. Brussels weather is really nice for now, although I'm told its not supposed to hold until the weekend.

In Flanders Fields

The best part about Belgium is that its tiny. You can get all over the place in one easy hour from Brussels, and the train tickets are ridiculously cheap. Also, the Trains to everywhere run at least twice an hour. So, yet again we headed out to Flanders, this time a little place called Lier, south of Antwerp. As usual, the town itself was very charming. We also got the bicycle rental deal which involved very cheap bike rentals, and a group of us biked around the fields around Lier. Unfortunately we experienced the worst part of Belgium, its enormously changeable weather, and had several strong downpours, punctuated by beautiful sunshine. Well worthwhile though. This time C and M were on the same train as us, though late for our original train.... some improvement in our coordination.

Bet Ghent

Ghent was the destination of choice this weekend. It is described by the guide book as frequently overlooked on tours of Western Flanders, and that seems like a real shame. It was nicer than Bruges, and more interesting than Delft, which are the two most similar cities that I've visited so far. Like Delft, it seemed as though real human being live there, but like Bruges it was spectacular and old world like. We left on Sunday Morning, A stayed home to do laundry, but Ju and Ry came. Unfortunately we took one of those milk route trains that stops at every little village along the way. It took about an hour, and then it turns out the tracks were broken after that, so we took the round-about bus. Ch and Ma left about two or three hours later, but joined us only shortly after our arrival, due to their use of the "express" train.

The previous night a bunch of us had been to the pan-latin american festivale here in Brussels. Unfortunately Si maintained his record of always going to the wrong place, and by the time all were assembled the metro was about to close ... none the less a good time was had by all.

I am also working quite hard at work now, attempting to make an update to the illustrious www.johnbowis.com. Not exactly sure when we will add the updates. I have also now completed the intern check list of fetching coffee, making photocopies, and running messages.

Working

I've been going to work lately. Mostly I've just been looking around, seeing how things go. Today there was a full session of the parliament, in which they voted on various reports. They got very agitated on at least two occasions: Once when one of the Eurosceptics said that Angela Merkel had lied (big no no) and another time, when the speaker was too perfunctory and missed the fact that someone had objected to the procedure of one of the votes. The chamber is very high tech. They have a giant score board that shows the results of votes like at a sporting event.

Other than that the most interesting things that I've done were attending a press conference on the topic of the cancellation of the Moscow gay pride parade. Several activists and MEPs want the parliament to vote on revoking the mayor's travel rights to the EU. And Desmond Tutu was addressing the parliament earlier in the week on the topic of Darfur. I'm not sure if I'll count my attendance at a session of the fisheries committee as being very interesting, although it had its moments. The major event was the conclusion of an agreement with Sao Tome and Principe.

Delft and the south Dutch

I took advantage of the remnants of constituency week to visit Flanders and the rest of the southern Dutch speaking areas. A few of us [A;J;M] went to Oostende for a beach trip. It was a classic North Sea holiday spot. Very cold water, kind of foggy, lots of people, crying babies, and horse and carriage rides. Nonetheless, it was good to get out of Brussels and enjoy some sea air, expunging the remnants of my cough.

Then I visited Delft and Rotterdam. Delft especially was very pictoresque. It was how I imagine Amsterdam, but the clean living version. In fact it was one of the nmost wholesome places I;ve been. The people were friendly, helpful; spoke super English, rode bikes everywhere, happy children played in the streets, and it was clean and well maintained. Holland seemed much better maintained than Belgium, but it still had a certain hippy chicness about it. Especially in Rotterdam which was a lot less clean living than Delft. Delft was a tiny bit like Bruges, but seemed like less of a tourist trap. People actually seemed to have jobs for example. Rotterdam seemed like a good place to go shopping.

Apartments and Leopold

I thought I would post a few pics of my apartment. Its been treating us well, except for the bathroom renovation thing. HOpefully that will be wrapped pretty soon. Unfortunately whoever cleaned up the communal bathroom threw out all of our soap, towels and toilet paper for some reason, so that's our crisis of the day for now. Unfortunately I'm the only bona fide French speaker living here, so I think our landlord really dislikes me at this point since I'm always calling him up and pestering him about this thing or that thing. Overall i think that our apartment is on the crummier end of the apartments I've seen here, but decent for the money, location, and fact that we saved by moving in a week early.

I went to the museum of Africa the other day. Very cool in a history geek kind of way, since they've hardly changed it since the 1960s, and even that was just a minor update on the 1930s edition. It was built buy King Leopold (not quite as bad as Hitler) the IInd to "showcase the potential of Africa" to the Belgian public. It has all sorts of vaguely horrific statues built in to it, with benevolent white folk reading to African children, the natives' mating rituals and such. THe interesting part is that in all of the oldest school parts, they've up little explanatory plaques talking about the museumology, ethnographic thinking, and so on that explains the forumalation of the displays. Also, all of the taxonomic models are totally falling apart and shedding their fur and scales and so on (there's an animals of Africa hall). They set up a brief display in the middle about the colonial era, which I thought was fairly well done in its explanation of the Belgian activity there, but has still apparently been criticized for whitewashing a bit. I can see that too, although it at least acknowledges a lot of what was going on. I think that most of this is in aid of saving money, not appeasing historians, but I thought it was very interesting.