Bruges

Being Saturday, we went to Bruges. Very medievel... Its main feature are its canals and ancient churches... and apparently lace. We didn't visit the lace museum though. Its very cheap to get there from Brussels. Only 5 euros each way. Very nice to have a day off. Went swimming yesterday. I had an interesting experience, being sent up to cut off tour director Berlin - after every presentation one hapless student is sent up to thank the presenter. Usually they wait until after all questions have been asked. However, one of the directors felt that the presentation was dragging on, and sent me to cut off the proceedings. It received much applause.

Parliament

I was assigned to my MEP today... a tory from London... pretty classic no? Well, he seems to be interested in "the environment and health" so, I guess not TOO classic. He actually seems like a really charming guy... has to get elected somehow. I met one of the backroom strategy guys, and he already has this giant master plan for how their grouping will take over the parliament, how the parliament will take over Europe, and how the Conservatives will take over the UK. Should be an interesting couple of months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bowis

Went to the Commission today ... "DG Relex" in the local jargon, meaning foreign affairs. It was awesomely long winded, but we had such good chairs, and jugs of water, and desks, and got to sit at the little desks that delegations sit at, so I was able to make it through without falling asleep once... unlike the tour director who fell asleep loudly and visibly, about 4 hours in. Ha ha. we got it on video, so we can never lose face on that front again. I don't understand how all of these people who have obviously given many MANY presentation before can be so bad at sticking to a simple deadline of half an hour, and that they don't understand that if you take five minutes to answer six or seven questions, its going to take half an hour to answer them. We have yet to keep to a single schedule.

At the parliament we sat in an extremely hot room that smelled of sulphur, so we were lucky that it was far more interesting.

Current scandals amongst the group - restaurants charge for water.

Antwerp

Antwerp... we visited the International Migration organziation... pretty crummy though, very poor presentations. I had a hard time staying awake. We spent some time in Antwerp though, and it rained. We visited City Hall. Visited a home for smuggled people.

Canada Mission

Trip to the Canadian Mission today. Long, but well organized. Excellent presentation about trade, opening remarks, environmental policy... others not so excellent. We almost had a fight on our hands when the topic of seal hunting came up. The Memorial contingent was happy with the Canadian government position. We went to a reception after that at the ambassador's residence. Not bad digs. Excellent wine and food. Put to rest the grumbling about the generally crummy food we've been catered so far. I actually thought the food was excellent for lunch yesterday, but today's has not been met by favour in any quarter. Tomorrow we're going to Antwerp. Its crazy how much time we spend on these crazy tours. Basically 12 hours a day, at least, is taken up with something or other, and then we go out to eat, and then its basically time to go to bed. Fun though.

study tour

The study tour has started, and we had an exceptionally busy day. We spent a very long time learning about European Neigbourhood Policy at the Centre for European Policy Studies, followed by more at the European Policy Institute. The hotel is nice, no real problems. Lots of people from all over. Mostly Carleton students. They are very inquisitive.

Brussels

So, I'm in Brussels now. Another pleasant flying experience as usual. I got to spend about 7 hours in Gatwick, the first 3 of which were spent in line at customs. (pictured) Other than that, I checked into my hotel at the same time as an Italian school group, so I just about repeated the experience waiting for the pandamonium to subside. I'm currently assembling a group of pictures of Brussels' worst architecture... and my there's a lot of it. It seems to follow a lot of Ottawa's lead in terms of boring institutional government buildings. Not to say there aren't some nice ones to balance them out.

A trip to the Metropole

Visited Ottawa for a conference at Carleton, on the exciting topic of writing policy papers, or if you're REALLY lucky "memos to cabinet". Apparently that's where the action's at. I'll have to remember not to use so much jargon or too many acronyms in my writing in future. I expect my vast reading public to hold me to that.

The conference was fun overall, despite the high blowhard/human ratio. These guys really makes me want to avoid academia, since they actually seem to have enormously inflated opinions of themselves, despite the fact that they're still only PhD candidates. Also Ottawa managed to defy the odds and have good weather in March, impressing all the out-of-towners.

After all of that it was on to J(2)'s birthday. I had never been rock climbing on fake rocks before, but its more fun than you would think. So I improved my "spotting" skills as best I could, and managed not to drop too many of the guests. Family remains in place, largely unchanged, although the new porch is nice.