Starting with today, we will create a new series of posts and will publish a photo every week that Pietro, our photographer has taken at work. Certainly, we expect him to justify a bit his choice and give some details, where was it taken, what for, what does it mean, why you chose it as the photo of the week…

Inauguration of the new Sakharov lounge area © European Union 2011 PE-EP/Pietro Naj-Oleari

As for the previous week, the winning photo represents vice-president Libor Rouček (foreground) and President Buzek with previous human rights laureates and activists at the ribbon-cutting ceremony inaugurating the new Sakharov lounge area outside the Parliament. .

Pietro explained us that he chose it in order to mark an extremely significantly important moment for the Parliament, with human rights activists and laureates gathering together for the inauguration ceremony at the EP and president Buzek making the honors. 

Sakharov prize is a hot subject for the Parliament and we have published a lot of content on this year's laureats and winners, as well as previous ones on our page.

No cars allowed. Photo taken from Flickr @John & Mel Kots

Although started in the 90s, the initiative was later on established at an international level by the European Commission and became part of a bigger yearly project, European Mobility Week. With more and more cities adhering to this concept, the initiative has spread all over, reaching 2017 cities this year. To my astonishment, when surfing a bit on the web the other days, I have found out that Oradea, my hometown in Romania, is also a part of this movement, with a part of the city closed to traffic.

On car free Sunday, as cars were banned from the city, people have conquered the streets. Only lost tourists or some ignorant drivers ventured on the streets, looking like hated creatures disturbing the peace during a perfect day in an almost reborn city. Needless to say I am exaggerating, but I felt a complete exaltation seeing crowds of people zooming around the long boulevards with their bikes and replacing the loud whirring noises made by cars with a joyful, much friendlier buzz of people on the streets.

It was the one time in this year that I had no problems breathing the air of Rue de la Loi (Map) - one of the most jam packed and polluted streets in Brussels – a CO2 sponge, as it is sometimes called…. Apparently pollution levels on this street were brought down up to ten times when compared with a regular day thanks to this. And indeed, it felt as if a huge vacuum absorbed for a short while the horrible smell of the cars – usually quite of a pet peeve, I can assure you. By the way, I once heard that the average life expectancy of people living in the EU’s polluted areas is reduced by around two years due to this.

Photo taken from http://psychoadvertising.wordpress.com/

As for the day, besides biking, there were other events around Brussels. I particularly enjoyed the bio gourmand market in Sablon Square, where farmers from Lot, a beautiful region in France, gathered around and enriched locals with some healthy food and some great French wine. As I was enjoying the friendly atmosphere, my mind slipped away to Food Inc. I don’t know how many of you have seen this documentary that sneaks in and unveils America’s corporate controlled food industry (it was nominated for Oscar in 2010 and won some 3 prizes the same year), but I will be extremely honest: the movie takes a part of your joy away, makes you feel a small, very small pebble in the ocean,  but in the same time, makes you slightly more aware of yourself and your surroundings. Just like car free days and the statistics collected after it…

However, it seems quite promising that such a considerable number of people (or should I call them pebbles?) are enjoying a car free day and that events like this one or similar ones get more and more people aware of the need to cut pollution and switch or at least, alternate, to a friendlier means of transport.

Sometimes stressful, rarely frantic but always home feeling, Brussels is packed with bikers and bike friendly inhabitants. I dare say then, why couldn’t this yet a yearly car free day become a monthly event?

I check my calendar and emails and quickly react to the ones I have not yet had time to check on mobile beforehand. I browse the news for a while until I sip the last drop of coffee and I am ready for the day.

...words are useless

My work is quite different from the one I used to have before; I am not dealing with writing articles anymore, except from the times when Cristina, my Romanian colleague is away. I am now involved in the projects related to the new digital media presence of the Parliament. EP has been trying to keep up with the new trends and there have been many changes around since I arrived. If social media and, I dare say the techie geeky trend were purely myths then, now we talk endlessly in meetings about creating planets that should fit in galaxies and that will be available as apps on phones and tablets, eventually to be promoted also on Facebook and Twitter.

It is self evident for the moment that we don’t have plenty of iPads, virtual reality headsets or Microsoft tables flying around, but I somehow have the impression that we are slowly getting there. First thing first: we have recently published a first version of EP mobile.

Moving on, 9.30 or 10 is usually the moment for me when I start my meetings. By the way, what I skipped before is the fact that meetings take more than half of my day, I attend around 4 or 5 a day. It is one of my favorite aspects of my job as I get to work with so many people in the same time. Moreover, each meeting covers a different project; there are 7 projects currently ongoing. This post is not a bragging tool, but an attempt to give you a sort of a picture of a different job than that of the editor in my unit and in the same time it is a self-acknowledgment of what I am truly doing here.

Once a meeting is over, I get back to my office, put down the updates that I had gathered and move on to next ones. Every two weeks we hold a special meeting where I am sharing these outcomes and the status of projects with the big bosses in order for them to take decisions that are to be applied to the projects. Suffice to say, this is what I do most of the time, but there are some other tasks that get added along the way.

Ever since I came in this unit, I have always fallen under the remarkable status of ‘youngest ones’ in the team, a notion I happily accepted, with all its pros and cons. Needless to say, it has not always proved easy to be young in a rather stubborn, not to say rigid institution, especially if I am to deal with so many people from poles-apart units.

No matter how much I fancy this post, it is not that seldom that one can be held back by age gap and all the implications jumping from it. Quite of a street bump, I must admit. But who cares once you like what you do? Close one eye, take a deep breath and switch approach accordingly,  eventually it does work, although it may take a while and some persistent effort … I mean, we are all growing up, I believe this is part of it! And to tell you the truth, I have been growing up in this environment.

Speaking of such matters, to my astonishment, during Friday’s stand-up, it suddenly struck me that although I am still proudly bearing the laurel wreath of youth, I have actually been in this unit for quite a while now. Today I turn 3 years, 9 months and 17 days :)

Well, it’s been a while now since I have been repeatedly hinted and suggested to write a blog, I know, I know… so I figured I could start with a normal working day. Et voilà!

This is how it works…every beginning of the week I am sending out an email informing 4-5 people that have expressed their wish or that reached their turn that it’s up to them for a short while to keep the blog ongoing.

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Still, no matter how much we enjoy writing for it or how many reviews we might get for our blog, we still don’t seem motivated enough to write on and keep the blog flowing on a weekly basis. After some inquires, I reached the conclusion that we are all finding some difficulties after all in mixing personal with professional worlds. Because let me tell you, this is not a typical blog where you can write yourself away with anything that blows in your mind.

No…With just a bit of exaggeration, every time we write, it feels just like we are walkers on a thin rope carrying a weighted pole, trying to maintain equilibrium and not lean too much on the right or too much on the left… But clearly… we are writing about EU, about our job within the institution, but we need to be careful to maintain a very clear equilibrium between this and thus avoid any possible confusion. Our work is to write and communicate to citizens, but under professionalism we are real people and we came up with this blog exactly to reinforce this statement.

Well, then I am wondering, should we try to preserve this mixing idea, but in the same time come up with more challenging and inspiring ones for us, the writers? Should we just back down, simplify it and just go for work related blog, news and everything we are usually writing about or should we become even more personal and closer to ‘real people’?

It feels just like we are walkers on a thin rope carrying a weighted pole, trying to maintain equilibrium.

My head goes around series of blogs, interviews, VIPs, news, more fun and inside touch, but I am continuously puzzled and cannot seem to brush off whether it would actually reach both writers’ and readers’ interest.

Let alone the bawl outs, I still cannot help but wondering, are we doing it right? How could we do it better?

Crazy webcommunciation unit

Then we have the blog here, where we really try to show a much human side of us, we want to give in the fact that we are real people as well. We speak 22 different languages within the Unit, we come from all around Europe, we all have our culture we are so proud of and this comes with totally different (and sometimes even strange for others) habits. This is quite visible from the inside, so my intention with this blog is to grab this and through it on the surface, for others to get a taste as well.

Here is a small compilation of ten things you most probably don’t know about our Unit:

Raffaella, our Italian editor, would never leave her office without her espresso cup.
• Evita and I:  you can feel the smell of galletes from the other end of the corridor. But make sure that whenever you feel like having a snack, Evita has dozens in there.
• Thibault likes music a lot. This I can see every day after 6 pm when he plays his music loud and starts singing. Does he hear the same thing as we do?
• Anete is the plant doctor for this corridor. Ever since we had discovered the power to cure half dead plants her bright perfectly sunny office has, it has been changing into a botanical garden.
• Speaking of light, opposite from this is Hanneke’s office; she likes to keep her office dark, lights off.
• Our head of unit has a special time frame, I was told. For a while, he used to keep an out of order clock on his wall and regularly check it out when late comers were popping by at work in the mornings.
• Josh likes tuna; my guess is that whenever he has his door closed, he is eating tuna and cottage cheese in the office.
• Please try to stay for more than 5 minutes without a jacket in Hanna’s office (Finnish editor) and let me know what you think afterwards.
• Whenever he needs a break, Pavel likes juggling, quite a good show, I admit!

I have no idea how you find all these, but for me, one cannot possibly demand for an extra proof – we are all just humans, I say.

What if the entire world would have diverse superpowers and we would have the same super jobs in a super powered Parliament? Well, then it is time for super Lisbon to come along… But that is another issue which I will not deal with now. So, coming back to childish wishes, I made a small survey among my colleagues to find out about their own superpowers wanna-have.

“Power tends to corrupt let alone superpower. So thanks, but no thanks”

Anete would like to be able to teleport from her cosy office in Brussels directly in the middle of the plenary in Strasbourg, afterwards dinner on a beach in the Caribbeans while being back on time for the following working day.

Our photographer, Pietro, wants to be able to freeze time whenever or how long he feels like. To be honest, he is one of the visionary ones since he chose the right career that is getting him the closest possible to his desired superpower, or am I mistaken?

We do have one super-hero in our team

Steve on the other hand would travel in time so as to discover on his own and check the accuracy of all the historical details and EU facts over passing the subjective results the modern search engines might offer. In any case, it’s very likely that he will meet Cristina in his past or future journeys, since they are both looking for the same power.

Just when you think it cannot get stranger than this, Florent would be very eager to show off with his walking on water ability. However, I am wondering whether he was just slightly subtle , whilst he had a much more religiously related power in mind…

Tibo, well, this is another story… Tibo wishes to have the power of controlling the minds of the others. Imagine working together with somebody who can actually read your mind and then control it according to his own views and perspectives. Well, hopefully for our team, this isn’t going to happen!

We would have some super healers in the Unit as well, thanks to Josh and Petra, who will be safe in front of any ceiling fall that might occur in Strasbourg every now and then, and we wouldn’t have to worry either while having them around.

Given all this superpower madness, we would never know when Raffaella and Asta would be around since their power would be to become invisible whenever they want to. So? Who closed that window then?

Some of us would be greedy as well, as I was very surprised to find out about Kurt’s super power. He would like to have the ability to take the powers of all the others. Well, this is what I call too much super power series watching, right Sylar?

Personally, I would like to have kameleon abilities, and be able to cloak, change appearance and infiltrate everywhere I want, without people necessarily realizing it’s me. But what happens if I will enjoy too much being you?

Still, not everybody wants to have a superpower and I think it’s good to keep a balance here as well: “Power tends to corrupt let alone superpower. So thanks, but no thanks” said one of our editor.

But then again, it is Christmas and I think we can all make wishes, even if most likely we will not find them under the Christmas tree, wrapped in shiny paper and tied with red ribbon… Can’t we?

Merry Christmas everybody and may all your wishes come true!