First Brussels' narrow and curvy streets started to fascinate me, orientation is there easily lost.

Art Nouveu residental houses and modern looking Art Deco buildings catching my eye. End of the 19th century, first half of the 20th.

Got a new/old Pentax camera. 50,000 clicks will the trigger last, 25,000 already done before me. Good for practicing.

Pictured – maison communale d'Etterbeek – wouldn't bet on style or on decade.

Dear reader,   
 

How are you? I hope you have been well. I am writing to you as I have a thing on my mind I have been waiting to put on paper…

I have been here for a while now and my Mom no longer feels an urgent need to send me Finnish candy and magazines by mail. It is a shame really – getting an unexpected parcel feels almost like Christmas and can cheer up any day. Nowadays I only get letters from home on special occasions – birthdays, name days and sometimes when the Belgian rainy season has has lasted waaayyy too long.

As you no doubt know, it is nice to receive normal mail. You rarely do nowadays, in the modern world it is all about instant communication through sms, social media and services such as skype. Who has the patience anymore to wait for news for days and days when you can deliver the message in a matter of minutes and get a response instantly as well.

At the moment I am reading a book called Diary of an Ordinary Woman by Margaret Forster that tells the story of an ordinary (but witty and stubborn) woman who was born in London in 1901 to an upper class family and lives through the century of wars, innovation and rapid change. My great-grandfather was born the same year, but that is a different story altogether – and not least because Finland was one of the poorest countries in Europe at that time. We had no Nokia, Angry birds or famous F1-drivers back then, mind you.

Anyway, my point is that the heroine of the story, Millicent, writes and receives a lot of letters. Sometimes she is delighted, sometimes terribly upset. We rarely see that kind of emotion anymore – the anxiety of checking the letterbox every morning and finally receiving an envelope with colourful stamps on it from a place far far away. It seems odd now that the world was able to spin around back then and things kept happening despite the lack of modern electronic aides.

I have to admit, it was long ago I last wrote a letter. When growing up I used to have a lot of penpals from around the world – even from distant places such as Singapore, Australia and Reunion. It is a shame I lost contact with them and we drifted apart, now having people to visit in exotic places would definitely be an asset. Luckily my Brussels friends are of moving sort as well – two of them are now in Australia, one returned from Malaysia some time ago and many others have wild travelling plans. So it is not likely that I will soon run out of people who send me postcards from the other side of the world.

I have always loved letters. You often put much more time, energy, thought and love into something handwritten and it often oozes emotion and personal touch in a completely different way. I hope writing proper letters never dies!

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the topic.
Keep in touch!

Best wishes from sunny Brussels,
xoxo,

Annastiina

Ps. The picture is by duncan (http://bit.ly/14UKZ7X).

When I got the great news that I would be interning for the European Parliament, one thing that crossed my mind was the appropriate dress code. I was under the impression that colours dominating the Parliament's dress code would be grey, black and dark blue. I also thought that men will be in suits and ladies in pencil skirts and high heels. This illusion was mainly the fruit of institutional stereotypes but I discovered that the European Parliament is also the headquarters of diversity.

This multiplicity of styles can be mostly witnessed in the Web communication team. For example, you can find people who wear suits on a daily basis while others are in sneakers and sunglasses. This diversity portrays the different backgrounds that all of us are coming from. However, I really doubt that you would ever see President Martin Schulz wearing a bright coloured jacket or sneakers while he is at work.

As you now know, everyone is free to express his own style as long as it respects this advice that is given in the manual for the trainees: "There is no particular dress code. Please make sure, however, that whatever you wear is neat and clean".

The first ice breaker was a Hungarian guest blogger Szabolcs from one of the most prestigious opinion leading political blogs in Hungary "Véleményvezér". We invited him to the EP plenary session on 16-18th of April. Let it be by choice or by chance, but we chose a hungarian guest, since April plenary session held a hot debate on Hungary Constitution issue. So we  thought it might be a perfect case for our guest to profit by following the bubbling discussions live in the EP hemicycle in Strasbourg.

No surprise we managed to challenge his curiosity as the House has 754 MPs from 27 EU member States and works in 23 languages, so is quite a unique body… especially when the debates heat the "roof"!

Szabolcs, being an inborn journalist managed to grab the "creme de la creme" from all his two busy days in the EP,  where he organised himself several interviews with hungarian MEPs, tweeted the debate live from the plenary session and published several posts on the blogging site.

Judging by his radiating face, it seemed that the guest blogger was impressed about the way this institution machine works, strolling along the long corridors of the House  together with the passing by politicians…and interviewing some of them while sipping an afternoon coffee in the Press bar.

"Being always virtual increases the distance from reality, but meeting Webteam in person made me change the opinion" – was his last phrase before Szabolcs left Strasbourg.

In May we expect other guest bloggers from Romania and in June-2 French to come and meet our Webcom team in Strasbourg and learn more about what we do! The project is foreseen till the end of this year for the time being, so lets keep rolling…

Steve used to be one of our most active bloggers. And our boss. Then he said goodbye. Have you ever wondered what is he doing now? He is not blogging about it for sure… So we went to meet him and simply asked.

What is your new job?

I've become a director for Relations with Citizens. It's a combination of everything to do with physical visitors to our premises, Visitors Service, the Parlamentarium and the to-be House of History due to open in 2015.

On the other side, there's unit dealing with events, exhibition Things that actually happen in and around Parliament's premises. And finally there's the Information Campaign unit responsible for all the things we want to communicate actively with public about, like values. Big one of the moment is the Election Information Campaign that precedes the European elections.

 What do you like the most about it?

I can pretend to be Don Draper. (Laughs and looks at his "Mad Men" style office furniture.)

It's always nice to do something new and learn a new area of activity. I like that it gets into that more real hands-on communication. It's about talking  to real people. It's very concrete, very real; it forces you to think very much about the Parliament as seen by genuine, real people outside the loop who don't have all our prejudices and jargon.

I also find it very interesting and stimulating to work with agencies and creative people, developing campaigns. It's a fascinating process. And it's very iterative process, backwards and forwards all the time but you are working with interesting people. And in my case as well, since it's a promotion, I can see things from bit wider perspective. But that's both advantage and disadvantage.

In what way?

I miss being able to really focus on projects in a particular area where you can see the results coming regularly. One of the great things about the web is that, because of an intangible nature of the product, it can be produced very quickly. Your results come gratifyingly often and concretely after what you've started the project.

What else do you miss about your previous job?

Real close-net team that was very dynamic and really enjoyed what it did. People there were very into their work. It was kind of a subculture, apart of everything else, maybe because of the particularly innovative nature of its work.

Although that said, in my current job I am spending almost as much time working with colleagues from Webcomm on online projects which is so much part of communicating with citizens. So I haven't really left it behind.

Any message for the blog?

I miss blogging on the blog. But I don't want to be the old guy who comes back and doesn´t know when it's time to go.

Anyway, the blog is a great thing. It does communicate with some important people out there. It's very important to explain what the Parliament is about online and that "we are on the side of angels" when it comes to communication.

As a "bonus": Steve in few objects.

AudioSlideSC from Web Com on Vimeo.