Feeling packed? Borrowed from http://flickr.com/photos/ahhyeah/454494396/

God, it is stressful. You have to put your “life” into boxes. Deal with 2 landlords at the same time, fight with internet and energy providers. Start living in trenches among boxes in the new place with a basic set of survival tools. Buy the missing furniture and take care of seemingly never-ending issues demanding hard physical labour. Ah, there’s still a full time job to do and ill babies to take care of…

But then, there’s a bright side. You can get rid of the junk you accumulated and probably never used (the “special” stuff only good for using in the attic/cellar/garage type of premises). Put that effort in making the new apartment liveable and likeable. Meet new people that you would have never met. Realise that it is yet another stop and everything is temporary. You can’t permanently own things and stay in one place, because YOU have that expiry date, remember? It’s all about moving light.

“Rent, be free” said a notice on a rental truck I once saw somewhere in Alsace. Owning things does not necessarily make your life better, sometimes it only complicates it. In some cases renting, sharing and helping is a much better investment than ownership. Enjoy being on the move ;)

Loving

1. Babies are born with an in-depth knowledge of Murphy’s laws. They always get ill on the first day you enter your new job or at least during plenary sessions. There’s never a clash of family and career.

2. Your employer is 100% sure babies are never ill for more than 2 days in a row. For some secret reason, babies are not so sure about that.

3. If there’s no way you can stay home with your ill baby because of work, there’s always professional medical help available. Be sure to inform them around 1 week before your baby gets ill, otherwise they won’t be able to assist you.

4. If you think that parents’ uninterrupted night sleep chances constantly ameliorate, you should refresh your math skills and remember what sinusoid is.

Caring

5. There’s no such thing as green babies: they waste food, soil clothes and outgrow them. And yes, they need some kind of diapers.

6. Babies and toddlers tend to have their own schedule which might be incompatible with your own.

7. If your parents living in your home country visit you, your baby will surely bring some gastroenteritis from the crèche and will share it with the grandparents just to be sure they have the ultimate experience and come to visit more often.

8. Bumps on toddlers’ heads tend to multiply: if they have one, they will surely get another one for the sake of symmetry

9. An angel might turn into a monster if you miss the bedtime by mere 15 minutes

10. American word “pacifier” is much more exact that British “dummy”, just because it brings peace on earth.

This inexhaustive list should not discourage you to have babies. It is an incredible learning and loving experience that you should not waste. Enjoy it ;) because kids do not belong to us, they are just given to us for a temporary care and protection.

Ok, now let’s twitt a bit more about going in the footsteps of Sakharov Prize winners of 2009, couple of days before the award.  

Kremlin

 Last-minute surprise visa on Friday, call to one of Moscow’s hotels, desperate efforts trying to find warmer coat and boots in Brussels right before leaving… No chance of sleeping during the night flight to Moscow.  

In focus: Oleg Orlov

Young, strict, but in the end helpful immigration officer filling in a form for me. Critically thinking bright taxi driver and nice hotel staff not charging me for an extra (previous) night. 

 Some sleep, a hasty steps past the Kremlin crossing the Moscow river to the press conference during the Conference ‘Sakharov’s Ideas Today’.

St. Basil's Cathedral

Catching the legendary Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Sergei Kovalev for couple of quotes. Chatting with journalists from grani.ru and Interfax while finally getting something to eat. 

Sergei Kovalev

Passing Lubyanka (ex-KGB building); hearing a familiar French accent when asking the way while searching for the Human Rights Centre Memorial.  

Seeing the courageous people risking their lives when doing their everyday work. Intensive Facebook chat (huge thank you to Maria for help!) with Oleg Orlov, leaving you extremely exhausted, but happy. 

Oleg Orlov and Lyudmila Alexeyeva

A sip of an excellent Caucasian cognac while hearing an account of  Memorial staff on being questioned by authorities the same day. Conversation with Katia who’s going to study in (…surprise) – Brussels. 

A very rewarding interview with Oleg Orlov and its hasty translation into English before everyone leaves the office. Dead-cold walk through the streets of Moscow, with hot bath at the hotel saving me from „permafrosting“.  

Sorry for 11 twitts packed in one text. Warning: twitting and writing synopses can make your language terribly telegraphic :)  

Special thanks to Oleg, Maria, Tatiana, Aleksandr, Jan, and everyone in Memorial for the friendly atmosphere and sharing their office with me for half a day. Big TNX to Anete, Christian, Rafa, Evita, Tibo, Steve and the whole Webteam for making it happen ;)  

Golden quotes:  

Taxi driver no 1: “Until this country starts producing something, it will go nowhere”  

Lyudmila Alexeyeva: “It is not awarded to me, but rather to all of us, especially those, who have lost their lives for the cause. If they were alive, they would be happy”   

Sergei Kovalev: Russia is currently a stumbling block in the way of international progress. It’s not alone; some other countries are also “splendid” enough.  

Oleg Orlov: “Sometimes you feel that you are scooping the sea with a spoon”  

Taxi driver no 2: “Airports, hotels, nightclubs, you wouldn’t service them without payoffs to gangs”  

@ the Airport café: “Man, move to another café. They sell the same stuff there, I’m busy”  

The cyberspace is also a home to crime, starting with hate speech and ending with paedophilia. But there’s also a grey zone in between that is cluttered with petabytes of irrelevant publicly available private content. Is social media making us waste our time, loose identity and in reality become anti-social?

Increasingly polluted internet

The consumers’ mankind has increasingly polluted the soil, water, air and the space. No surprise that the cyberspace – a copy of real life – is not immune. A huge part of the content the mankind is uploading and consuming is a digital trash.

The cyberspace is clogged with sex, porn and Britney Spears, we are flooded with meaningless Wats up? Hit/poke Me back; Check out my profile And Let me know Do you like me; Good morning twitterland, angry comment entries and in some cases misleading information. Is internet becoming a cyber junkyard with tiny islands of real content here and there?

What do we want?

We want fun, easy money and overnight fame. We need faster, more powerful and bigger capacity gizmos. We are buying more equipment than we need: just as our wardrobes with all those clothes our terabyte hard drives are packed with data we would never use.

We are snapping auto-mode shots with DSLRs, uploading billions of photos and constantly updating our “statuses” online. Yes, there already are kids who feel nervous if they’d spend 30 minutes without updating their “I had my breakfast” messages across multiple social networks.

We want easy digestible information that is prêt à consommer. We like to quickly copy paste, not to create. We need to shout louder than others and use dirty tricks to “optimize” our ability to be heard and seen, thus depreciating the value of digital content and reducing possibilities to find relevant information. As you are only accountable if you breach law, content doesn’t really matter, what matters is the number of views and the traffic you get.

Twitter became the voice of Iranian resistance, but what were you getting among the top entries after clicking the #iranelection couple of weeks ago? Many irrelevant posts decorated with bodies in swimming suits.

Pollution of the virtual world pollutes the real world too. We clog information highways, slow down the internet and yes, we produce CO2, as servers, PCs and networks eat up electricity. We produce 0.2 to 7g of CO2 per Google search, they say.

 We have no more free time, because most of it is spent swallowing information or producing it. You can’t enjoy the moment, because you have to document it and publicise it on the net. That’s the essence of our affluent digital consumer society.

Mass production of information

Let’s face it, much of the information (should we just call it “data”?) we produce is a junk. And the bubble is inflating with exponential speeds.

We have no more free time, because most of it is spent swallowing information or producing it. You can’t enjoy the moment, because you have to document it and publicise it on the net. That’s the essence of our affluent digital consumer society.

We are exhibiting the perfect ourselves rather than spreading ideas we have. It seems that everybody’s shouting, but no one’s listening, because we just can’t keep our attention focused. We keep posting infinite information and are busy running our own reality shows.

We are prosumers of digital content adding “friends”, “fans” and “followers”, but how many of them are genuine ones, not just wanting to increase their own visibility (thanks for the add, who cares)? Are there many people on your list of friends that you’ve never seen after graduating and will probably never see again?

(Anti-)social and (anti-)private media?

If you are not in the cyberspace, you do not exist. Couple of years ago one of my friends was seriously preoccupied that she was “not found by the Google search”. Is person’s value suddenly judged by the number of “friends” on social networks, tags, “likes” and the rating they get? Is it a real life or just a compensation of it?

“It is strange to use my private Facebook account for work purposes”, I said to my German colleague during the election communication campaign. “Private Facebook profile is … a misnomer, like clean coal, or natural plastic”, he said, and that is so true :).

Getting the identity back

Is there a way to separate private from public, but also stop the erosion of privacy online? How can we control our digital shadow and protect ourselves from identity theft? Is leaving a digital footprint good or bad, how can we control it or wipe it off completely? Do we need social networking luddites that would clean up the cyberspace and delete our accounts to protect us from surprises of being tagged? I don’t know, you tell me ;)

P.S. As this entry wasn’t elaborated well enough, I hope its digital footprint won’t be too big and it will be duly recycled into something useful.

Car seat by jules:g

The idea of this entry was born when I was driving (first time ever and for good reasons – I’ve always taken a train before) those 430 km from Brussels to Strasbourg, to join 6 other colleagues of the web communication unit . After asking around a few colleagues and MEP assistants and resisting the temptation of sending “a spam message” on free seats to Strasbourg, I hit the road the next morning.

The trip came just one day after coming back from leave, so there was not much time to find co-passengers, with all the catching up for the website and other tasks to do.

Unethical single seat

The drive on a sunny Tuesday was great, and with a little help from Augie March and Travis music I have done it. And even though I was driving an environmentally friendly LPG car with 1.2 engine and new tyres , I wasn’t feeling the greenest driver on Earth with all those empty seats around me. Will there ever be a centralised car- sharing scheme for EP missions, so no seats are wasted in vain?

Europe behind the wheel

Look at mine – a French car assembled in Turkey, bought in Lithuania with the money borrowed from a Swedish bank, assured with a Latvian company and converted with Italian LPG equipment.

When travelling through Belgium, Luxembourg, France you can really see the benefits of borderless Europe and the power of European funds used to improve the infrastructure.

Usually your car is a real European too. Look at mine – a French car assembled in Turkey, bought in Lithuania with the money borrowed from a Swedish bank, assured with a Latvian company and converted with Italian LPG equipment. I am not going any deeper that that :)

Two speed Europe: traffic offenses

Alas, there’s not enough Europe yet. Why? By trying to get to work as quickly as possible I was probably flashed speeding while passing Luxembourg. As there’s still no efficient data exchange on transnational traffic offenses, will I be immune to justice just because my car has Lithuanian licence plates?

Luckily, the situation will soon change, as a future directive on a cross-border road safety will ensure that foreign drivers caught speeding are not more equal than the locals. It will include speeding, drink-driving, not wearing a seat belt and failing to stop at a red light. Road hooligans beware!

More standardisation needed

During the trip I skipped cheap, but crowded filling stations in Luxembourg, but when I tried to fill up my LPG tank in France I was hit by a harsh reality – event though I would be able to fill it up in UK or Italy and have a Belgian adaptor, it does not help in France. How long will we wait until we have a single European standard on LPG fillers, chargers and other handy things?

More Europe and less empty seats, that’s what a European traveller needs. And yes, I already have a fellow-traveller for coming back, and a bicycle for getting to work in Brussels, but no French LPG adaptor yet  :(

Vilnius

Vilnius has many faces. The old cosy Vilnius of cobbled winding streets. An open, cosmopolitan and tolerant Vilnius that invited foreigners to come and settle since 1323, that has Polish, Jewish, Russian and Byelorussian influences. A city of culture and education with its university dating back from 1579. A green town with rivers Neris and Vilnelė washing its banks. A Vilnius of Baroque with pearls of Gothicism and Classicism.

Angel

A strange and crazy Vilnius with the statue of Frank Zappa and a TV tower which becomes the biggest Christmas tree at the end of each year. A town that has a republic inside of it – “Užupis Republic” inhabited by artists celebrating its independence on April 1, watched over by a sculpture of an angel.

Uzupis

There is also a Vilnius which was occupied by foreign troops for many years and seen soviet tanks crushing people on January 13, 1990. A Vilnius that saw its 40 ancient churches transformed into warehouses (some got lucky – became museums or picture galleries) by the communists… There’s this horrifying feeling that catches you when you visit the KGB museum that used to be pointed at by a hand of a bronze Lenin

A Vilnius that still has a few soviet relicts, starting with mentality leftovers and ending with some ugly soviet blocks of flats baptised “Khruschevka”. A Vilnius that currently happens to have a homophobic mayor who refused to let the EU’s truck “For Diversity. Against Discrimination” into the city.

Vilnelė

Vilnius was burning down and resurrecting, occupied and breaking free. 2009 is one more occasion for revival: the capital of culture’s slogan for festivities is “culture live” that aims at authentic creation.

The year of culture has kicked of with a modern music and dance project @Hoffmann_ Nutcracker followed by a spectacular music and light show directed by Gert Hof. The highlights of the year include Art in Unusual Places, Vilnius Book Fair, Street Musician Day, “The Oak Mystery”, Culture Night and Water Music of Capital City. As Lithuania celebrates its millennium in 2009, other events like The Millennium Song Festival of Lithuania “Songs of the Centuries” are also not to be missed. Come and see it yourself.

After a crazy (in the bad sense) start of the week - a creative project that made the second half crazy as well, but in a good sense :) We will never look at the plenary chamber, toilet mirrors, interpreter booths, TV sets and TV studios, carton boxes, popcorn, ushers, Pietro and, definitely, Fred the same.

A short meeting with Gaëlle, Thibault, Fred and Elisabetta with 10 creative concepts laid down on the table. Make up for the EU flag, carton-box TV set with a hemicycle photo on it, EP report “as seen on TV”, “genetically modified” remote control, “huissier” reading about himself in a TV magazine, interpreters sending hidden messages, heads inside carton-box TV sets surrounded by serious “fonctionnaires”, lipstick-painted TVs on toilet mirrors, TV presenters with a support crowd, hemicycle with a simple chap in the middle of it eating pop-corn and zipping imaginary TV channels.

One message – get ready for the launch of the EuroparlTV. Hours of hard work and creativity. 1,700 pictures taken. Some banners rejected by the big bosses upstairs. Still, 6 of them that will be seeing the world! And understanding that everything is a moment, as those banners that go into the oblivion after one day…

Memories that are here to stay:

• Shooting in men’s toilet near hemicycle during a plenary session – watching lost faces staring at the camera and Gaëlle J Yes, security did come to see us.
• Hard work to make an atmosphere cosy enough for Fred to wear my yellow T-shirt, Homer Simpson slippers and eat popcorn in the middle of hemicycle. It was not cosy enough to make him wear boxers though ;-) 
• Faces of passers-by when seeing “the show” in the hemicycle. Yes, a visitor group came to the plenary gallery while we were shooting. And yes, if you wonder, security came to see us again.
• A strange feeling of being completely isolated from the world inside an interpreter booth

To be continued? Maybe…