"The Wanderer" by Caspar David Friedrich

Some secrets may best be left dead and buried….but our team kept its nose to the grindstone this year with the election run-up. Now it’s time to unwind pretty much like the string in the arrow after being stretched all along. We have hence decided to recharge our batteries, by breathing deeply in and out and let ourselves be inspired by the different members of our team about how to live life to the full, especially as all-round Europeans! Our beavers went around sniffing to build their summer nest.

Your senses are sollicited!

Colours, noise, music, beer, food……

As for me I like the theory about introverts and extraverts. The real theory stipulates that the introvert is one who to finds energy by withdrawing into himself whereas the extravert must spend time with people to do the same. It has nothing to do with people being shy or timid or open or loud! Hence it is subtle…but after reading this I will try to give it a guess at who is whom. Join me!

 As you approach, well I work just opposite Mindaugas’ office,  rhythm penetrates your bones before you realise his bulimia for music transcends just listening to anything all the time. One must listen to him playing the Birbynė. If you have not seen that instrument check it out! Beyond that our Lithuanian colleague is entirely faithful to his nationality. He plays basketball, once a week as he likes team play and strategy. But please note that this is the second religion in his country which nearly beat NBA.

 Another love of something traditional is ”táncház”. These are bars offering folk dancing in Transylvania, which also developed as an underground movement in opposition to Communism. But thank God for love….romance came to bless our Hungarian colleague one summer there as he met his wife. Today his latest hobbies include time with his children, cycling and did you say Tokay…? yes….unforgettable wine that transports one from Brussels to Hungary in a jiffy to Villány.

As our taste buds awaken we must visit the Vietnamese food restaurant in Place St. Josse that Christian, our German editor recommends for those solemn moments. A fan of non-fiction in English, not German, having accumulated miles of travelling to exotic places like Panama, Vietnam and East and Central Africa, Christian is more faithful to the sea than national mountains.

No more no less come Raffaella, beach, sun and hours of sunbathing personified. But you may also want to try her baked bread and biscuits on a dull glum day in Belgium or accompany her to alternative European cinema in Brussels.

True to the house tradition imminently established, Barbara, our Spanish editor has just returned from a cruise to the Balearic islands. Music, Spanish literature and swimming form her cup of….sangria!

Time to relax…do you hear the wind blowing, the swishing of the sea? Breathe in and out, think of colours, sun gleaming on the ocean. That was Sofia who adores the sound, smell and light of the ocean. That was just a power nap before being transported for a ride on public transport to Brazil and China.

Hang on for a second!? Florent has just come back from his second trip to China! If you missed that then look our for him sailing on the cost around Brittany. His dream is to sail around the world one day. Advise “If you give up your dreams you grow old.”

Florent also enjoys drinking beer with friends in summer. In that he joins Josh, our Slovakian colleague, who may equally be seen playing or singing along with the guitar alone or in Place Luxembourg.

Love of countryside is that of Hannariikke who is passionate about horses as they are intelligent and lovely. She hails from the country of thousands of lakes….so by extension this summer she will enjoy the Greek sea.

Leszek and Manja both love cycling…..with a difference! The first cycles to work to reduce pollution, the second cycles about 3 hours daily. A sport lover, look out for her on a racer at night. But in some ten years’ time  or later, you may want to look out in the skies to catch this lover of Polish fiction finally fulfilling his dream of flying after having obtained his pilot licence.

But beware Pavel in some thirty years’ time will also hope to be flying. At the moment his leisure is taken by a multitude of activities from juggling, to magic, to building and flying model airplanes which are radio controlled, to spending time with his two children, running and cycling. Am a bit out of exercise suddenly…shortage of breath hits me! Well, Pavel will you that “you cannot live without passion. Otherwise you can simply crawl into your grave. Leisure is the key to happiness, to enjoying life, otherwise we are impoverished. We need to find time for friends and to switch off. Just feel free to call Pavel if interested as he seems to not find enough people to share that passion.

On a quieter, pensive front, comes David, our British colleague. True to fact as I often catch him in the morning to work, he likes walking around buildings, along the sea…that is after work! and reading history books. I know where to go when I am looking for books like “Fortress Malta,” for example. Anete finds that her hobbies change all the time that it is hard to pinpoint….It is part of her wanting to learn new stuff, discover new countries, new territories, travelling like her recent trip to Corsica or Galicia….

Colourful is also Nadina’s office, our Romanian colleague….with watercolour and graphic painting in her office. Hobby thriving in spite and despite parents’ lack of support. So much goes for will power. Her latest craze is “Capoiera,” Brazilian combat dancing. She is currently reading Jonathan Safran’s book about life seen from an eight year old’s perspective. I think I will give it a shot.

Greenery, solitude……

We may all come from the EU but some of us have adopted Belgium, taken for granted by so many expats. Svetla likes walking in the Ardennes, and reading  in German and Bulgarian to maintain homecountry wit!

For those who know Belgium vaguely, this place offers nice gardens behind the grey-looking facades. Petra is in that typically Swedish and Belgian. She relaxes by touching the earth, planting flowers. Her latest craze is on “Cosmos.” but be careful to pick the slugs in time as you may see the flower disappearing before your very eyes.

Don’t you find that at one point you want to get away from it all? Thibault actually relaxes by writing…a novel  these days. He equally likes to be trasported by US thrillers and science fiction “loin du quotidien.” No , no Thibault does not escape all the time…you may catch him deftly, heftily around you taking photos. He likes portraits of people and likes working on people in photos….As long as he does not take my picture from profile I can live with that.

 Funny I wonder if our team drives Thibault, our coordinator, and Steve, the “one who responds reluctantly to the word boss”, nuts!  You see Steve also likes to “get away from it all. To unwind he thinks of…yes yes he’s British…hence hill walking somewhere “rainy and remote…in Scotland. The wilderness, the scent, the freshness. That’s the one thing he misses most in Belgium. He would love to travel to unfrequented places…Canada,  Australia…well he used to in his previous life (author’s comment). Otherwise he loves cycling and dreams of transforming his garden, currently serving as football ground to his two boys, into an English garden. That is not all. His dream is to write a great novel, you know” the novel that everyone has inside of them.” Does all this not remind you of “The Wanderer” by Caspar David Friedrich?

As for the writer, well I am currently so happy to have met all these people. That is one thing I enjoy in life. As for the rest I then need to withdraw into piano playing or silk painting, or writing but mostly reflecting and sipping a good cuppa of Earl grey in the sunshine in front of deep green-blue sea listening to the waves talking to me….!

Frankly, I find all of this a bit of a shame. From a communications perspective it’s tragic.

It’s not that there isn’t real politics behind all this. The fight for positions and influence has been tough, the deals which result in the outcomes to be formalised this week come after tough negotiations and sometimes bitter fights. Heads of government across Europe even get involved. There are winners and losers. Some are in, others are out. For the well-informed observer, the process is a fascinating one. Yes, it’s even fun to watch.

Trouble is we can’t talk about it. At least not to our readers.

From the outside, it can be hard to tell what's really going on. (Photo EP)

In house, the rumour mill has been in gossip-fuelled overdrive. Unsurprisingly, the Parliament is full of people with a taste for political gossip, who love nothing better than to trade stories, even where they have no direct stake in the outcome, which, of course, in our little hothouse, they frequently do. Acquaintances in the political groups with titbits to offer about, say, what latest trade of a chairmanship against a vice-presidency is in the offing take on the aura of oracles, their delphic utterances propelling a new story into the heady swirl of speculation. For those thus inclined, the hard-core political geeks and anoraks, it is also possible to add some judicious number-crunching into the mix. One can for example immerse oneself in the arcane delights of the d’Hondt mathematical formula for the attribution of positions in a system of proportional representation (Parliament even has its own variation on this fiendish calculus: “d’Hondt continu“). Empirical Britishers, brought up on cricket stats and an unwritten constitution, may prefer to delve into murky precedents, long-standing gentlemen’s agreements and case law.

This is the messy end of democratic politics, at the same time highly technical and deeply human.

There’s no question that the whole thing is highly entertaining. This is the messy end of democratic politics, at the same time highly technical and deeply human. So it’s a pity we are unable to share the joy of politics with the outside world. I fully understand of course. It would be – from an institutional perspective – a highly risky enterprise to communicate on the ongoing shenanigans, to speculate on outcomes and to report the latest word on the street (word on Place Lux, in our case perhaps) to our avid readership.

Risky but fun. There is a serious point here. The fact that so much of the real politics takes place off camera produces the impression among uninformed outsiders (i.e. most people) that everything just carries on in the Parliament as if the elections never happened. Most of the cliffhangers, the battles, the political realignments and, above all, the personal stories linked with them remain invisible to the public, leaving the impression of a dull, technocratic parliament, where everything appears to be pre-cooked and most elections to positions of power seem to produce  North Korean style majorities endorsing the will of the men in grey suits. It’s not the reality, but it could stand as a metaphor for the EU as a whole: impermeable and technocratic seeming from the outside, fascinating if you can get under the surface. Perhaps, as many have remarked before, we need a European West Wing to tell people what this place is really like.

Meanwhile, I look forward to the week to come.  It’ll be interesting, but maybe not as interesting as it should be.

By Evita & Anete. Before the elections we had the opportunity to carry out a project that was a repetition of an experiment made 50 years ago. We already wrote about the recipe of this experiment and now it is time to summarize the results.

7 YaBs completed their mission

Overall we can say that it has been a blissful time – stressful, but very interesting.
 
• 7 secret agents out of 27 reached their destination and will become real agents as promised: Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Maltese, Spanish, Bulgarian and Estonian. 2 countries of Iberian Peninsula, 5 “new” Member States. Is there any connection?

• Some celebrities complained about not being informed beforehand officially.  Sorry, there are some things you don’t inform about. Did they inform us that they would become famous before they did it? For this reason or another, the Italian, Latvian, Greek, German and Luxembourgish secret agents got stuck one step before reaching celebrities.

• 2 secret agents got lost from the very beginning. Mystical things happened to Danish and Cypriot YaBs as we were never able to obtain even the smallest piece of information about their adventures. We just hope they’re still alive.

• Swedish secret agent made a virtual completion of the mission – Erik met his celebrity through the TV screen. Typically Swedish – reminds us of the jolly book of Astrid Lindgren about the best friend ever Karlsson-on-the-Roof who believed there was a man sitting in the TV box.

Mystical things happened to Danish and Cypriot YaBs as we were never able to obtain even the smallest piece of information about their adventures. We just hope they’re still alive.

• Remaining 13 secret agents travelled around from hand to hand, but at some point they got stuck. Why? Lack of motivation and interest? Fear of looking silly? Fear of being involved in political matters? Not knowing what to do exactly? Procrastination? The reasons could be more than many. Some movement followed after slight pushing from our side although we didn´t want to intervene during the mission. But still… Well, would somebody like to write a PhD on this?

• The first one to leave was the Italian YaB, the first one to arrive: Polish. Does it say something about the mentality or work culture?

• We received many funny and imaginative photos picturing the YaBs in diverse environments and situations — meeting mimes and military men at the Brandenburger Tor, bathing in the sea, having lunch or a drink, partying, having a medical check etc.

• Facebook page for Travelling YaBs now has 554 fans, out of them 61% are woman. In the web we found an article that says that 98% of women love James Bond. Of those 98%, 95.7% of them have had erotic dreams involving at least one of the Bonds. Is it something similar here or are the mother feelings stronger in this case because they are so small and cute?

• The Polish, Latvian, Danish, Greek, Italian and Portuguese media covered the missions. Strange enough: the most of the journalists involved were also women.
 
Conclusion: only 7 YaBs arrived but… sometimes the road is the destination. We hope you enjoyed.

Pimping the secret agents (or YaBs)

As our work does not leave our minds as soon as we are leave the building, one evening I was talking to our Latvian editor Anete and she told me about an idea that had crossed her mind. She wanted to prove that the world (in our case we’ll stick with Europe) is smaller than we think and we are all connected in one way or another. Today her idea has grown into an experiment that we are opening this week.

Here is the recipe (in case of repetition modify amounts and/or steps accordingly):

1. Take 27 figurines and give them to your team colleagues who afterwards turn them into YaBs (yellow and blue, you know).

2. Assign them their nationality.
Each of ours comes from a different EU Member State.

4. Give each of the secret agents their real name and their own code name.

All their code, name and nationality.

5. Choose the starting date of the mission.
The YaBs will start their on 9th of May in the European Parliament’s Open Day (we will be handing them out at Web Communication stand on the 3rd floor in the European Parliament)

Naked YaBs

6. Make some rules to make it more fun.
6.1. Each YaB should travel from one person to another, and should be passed from hand to hand until it reaches its final destination.

7. Make a buzz about it

Fully dressed (hum, body-painted) YaBs

 8. Wait for the results

And this is how you create your own experiment!

P.S. Idea is based on the Six degrees of Separation theory which states that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth.

9. The YaBs project in a nutshell

1. We will release 27 YaBs on Saturday 9 May in the EP buildings at Brussels during the Open day. You want to be one of the first link in the chain? Drop us an e-mail at WebComm@europarl.europa.eu now!
2. Each YaB has a target and a destination. Your role is to give it by hand to another link in the chain so each YaB can reach its target and its destination before 4 June 2009.
3. All YaB travel’s steps must be illustrated with photos of the YaB and names or nicknames of their guardian (and as many photos of you and the YaB as you wish). You can follow the Yabs travel on their Facebook page.
4. It’s all about fun, degrees of separation and solidarity! Help a YaB, carry a YaB, give a Yab!  

10. P.P.S. Thanks, Nadina, for inspiration!