In the past ten days, I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about the structure and functions of European Union institutions. I have been in Brussels, at a conference hosted by the Fulbright program in Belgium and Luxembourg entitled ‘Introduction to the EU and NATO.’ In six days, we managed to visit the Commission, the Council, and the Parliament in Brussels; the Court of Justice and the Court of Auditors in Luxembourg; the College of Europe in Brugge; and NATO. It was quite a busy week – highlights included mini-euro chocolate coins during our coffee break at the Commission, lawyers in wigs at the Court of Justice, and, of course, it’s hard to be more exciting than the Court of Auditors. I also can now explain, with some degree of authority, arcane EU concepts such as ‘qualified majority voting’ and the ‘codecision process.’ (These are even more difficult to grasp than, say, the electoral college, or even the infield fly rule. And they change every few years.)
Despite the fact that the sun shone for only two hours out of the ten days I spent in Brussels, I very much enjoyed my trip. Putting together a group of a few dozen American students, who live in every major European capital, and letting us loose on the city of Brussels, led to very interesting outcomes such as consumption of dangerously large quantities of mussels, multilingual karaoke, and a massive game of ‘Red Rover’ on the Grand Place. I am not sure the neighborhood eatery near our hotel will ever recover from its invasion, not once but twice, of a group of 18 twentysomething Americans ordering buckets of mussels and bowls of fries. We nicknamed the restaurant the “bowling alley,” since its décor of wood paneling and big-screen TV seemed to evoke bowling alley vibes in many of us. (This was the type of place, were it in Massachusetts, that would feature Keno quite prominently.) Though the atmosphere would likely be less amusing in groups smaller than 18, they did serve the best mussels I ate all week. While I was in Brussels, I also got the chance to find my way to a number of different buildings of the European Commission for meetings, including one which was in what appeared to be the Belgian equivalent of Silver Spring, Maryland.
The most frustrating part of my time in Brussels, however, came during my early morning pilgrimages to the ‘EasyEverything’ internet shop. For those of you who have not had the privilege of patronizing the multinational monopoly that is ‘EasyEverything,’ it is a chain of inexpensive, large, orange, 24-hour internet cafes that have sprung up in many major cities across the globe. They are owned, I believe, by the same conglomerate that owns ‘EasyJet,’ the low-cost European Val-U-Jet clone. Based on my experience with the reliability of computers in ‘EasyEverything,’ I can say without hesitation that I will never, ever fly EasyJet. It is hard to express the degree of irony which the name ‘EasyEverything’ evokes. (We argued all week whether ‘SleazyEverything’ or ‘EasyNothing’ was a more fitting alternate name.) Between the Belgian keyboard (which is even worse, if you can imagine, than the French keyboard), the absence of any disk drives, and the lack of Microsoft Word, I am not sure how it could call itself an internet shop – and that was before their servers ate ten megabytes of files I’d downloaded – twice. Between the technical limitations (EasyEverything, plus a laptop without a working modem) and the time pressure (working around the seminar sessions, basically between 12-2 am and 5-7 am, with several deadlines to meet), it’s a miracle I got anything done at all!
Even though I was in Brussels, I couldn’t quite escape Denmark. In the Musees des Beaux-Arts, which I visited on my last day in Brussels, I passed by a large school group, which was talking about a painting. Suddenly, I realized that I was understanding a little bit of what the teacher was saying – and they weren’t speaking English, or French either. Alas, it was a group of 60 Danish high schoolers, apparently on some sort of field trip. Despite my excitement over being able to understand a few scattered Danish words, my time in Brussels caused a great deal of linguistic confusion. Though I made my best efforts to remember my very limited French, I managed to speak more Danish that week than I ever do in Denmark. My first attempt to order in French seemed on the surface successful, until I realized that I had linked all the different items with ‘og’ instead of ‘et’. And under no circumstances is ‘tak’ an acceptable response to ‘voila.’
