As so often happens in life, my moving to Brussels, although potentially a life-changing decision, wasn’t something that I consciously planned. At least not at the time when I got the email from the European Parliament, inviting me to an interview with Steve and a couple of other bigwigs from DG Comm. This might seem strange, as I have dealt with the EU issues throughout my professional career, not to mention quite a few hours spent studying for two competitions and a five-month stint at the European Commission’s DG Trade.

I had my first peek at the sleek tower of Brussels’ Hôtel de Ville from the doorstep of the city’s central train station, teeming, it seemed to me, with unsavoury characters which could have easily escaped from one of the adult-only comics sold in the station’s news shop.

Barely 18, I was going through that inevitable rite of passage for any would-be traveller, a rail tour of Europe, with just enough money to afford a dorm bed every night, but with just enough courage and youthful carelessness to crash under the stars (and an occasional raindrop) when I felt like it. You could say I am no stranger to French beaches from Côte d’Azur to Normandy.

It was mid-1990s and I was passing through Brussels on my way from swanky Paris to free-wheeling Amsterdam. The city didn’t make much of an impression on me. Crowds were squeezing into the Grande Place, it smelt of French fries and stale piss and you had to be very careful about animal excrements littering the streets. Paris, I thought to myself, but without the Eiffel tower.

Fast forward seven years or so. It’s a freezing, rainy afternoon as our plane touches the tarmac at Charleroi airport. Coming from Ireland’s west coast (Limerick, to be precise), the weather isn’t really something that bothers a bunch of MA in European integration students on their way to Brussels. Conversations mainly revolve around differences between Irish stouts and Belgian lady beers, as the Irish contingent in our expedition pejoratively calls them.

For me, however, this Brussels trip was less about beers and more about a decision to go all out for a career in European institutions. Maybe it was the audacious architecture of Berlaymont, stories galore about the sweet life of eurocrats or just the appealing smell of power in the halls of European Parliament  – from then on Brussels had a special place in my career plans, if not exactly in my heart.

Sure enough, three years later I was back again, this time as a stagiaire at the European Commission’s DG Trade. Strangely, I didn’t find it hard to survive on a paltry salary EU institutions give to their trainees. A studio, small but warm, in the heart of Ixelles, just across the street from pumping music of Matonge bars, was really all I needed to plunge headlong into the raw vigour that brews in Brussels’ bowels, a long way from glitzy EU palaces.

A studio, small but warm, in the heart of Ixelles, just across the street from pumping music of Matonge bars, was really all I needed to plunge headlong into the raw vigour that brews in Brussels’ bowels, a long way from glitzy EU palaces.

You might expect that this experience only further cemented my resolve to go to Brussels and have a real European career. But this is not what happened. I came back to Slovenia not only with two successfully passed competitions under my belt, but also with a thirst to see the world up close, to experience it the way I experienced Brussels, living where other people live, eating what other people eat and having a blast where other people have a blast.

Almost immediately after my return, I and my girlfriend started planning a long sabbatical in South America. Not only did my exploratory six weeks in Colombia not quench my thirst for travelling, they only enflamed it. Then, just at the end of a long Indian summer last year, as I was browsing airline websites for cheap tickets to Bogota, Buenos Aires and La Paz, an email from the Parliament arrived …

As I look through the window of my office on Rue Montoyer, my view blocked by the EP’s imposing Willy Brandt building, I am thinking about what might have happened had I not seized the opportunity to go back to Brussels. There’s the city’s raw vigour again, its broad avenues, houses packed tightly together on rolling little hills, people from all over the world speaking in tongues you don’t understand – now that I think of it, it really reminds one of Tangiers, as my girlfriend noticed when she first arrived here.

As for the vistas of other continents, they will have to wait – although on a sunny day like this, I can still hear the alluring whisper of lands unvisited.