There’s been a bit of discussion on Twitter this morning with @megankenna and @thefashioncloud at the prohibitively high cost of Wifi in and around the EU quarter in Brussels. Many conferences are organised in hotels and the cost for wifi can be up to €25 per day. This, I fear, is at least as much thanks to the lack of competition among hotels and venues in the EU quarter as anything else!
Anyway, so what’s the solution? Continue reading
As part of my relentless pursuit to be green with my travels, I’m always taking the train. But for a trip I’m planning 3-6 December to Berlin, my patience is really running low.
To get to Berlin from London I have 2 options – Eurostar to Brussels, on to Köln with ICE or Thalys, and then ICE to Berlin. The trip takes 10 hours, a whole day. Alternatively I can take the Eurostar to Paris (yes, Paris, i.e. south from London rather than east), and from there a night train to Berlin. 16 hours. There are a couple of half-way similar options, involving late night changes in Mannheim. No.
The problem – in essence – is that there are no night trains from Brussels any more (see this and this). Have a look at the City Night Line map shown above, or their destinations list. CNL trains reach Rome, Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague. But not Brussels. A 2100 departure from Brussels could split in Hannover, with onward carriages to Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin and even Prague, plus with Brussels 2 hours away from London, suddenly a whole swathe of northern Europe would be more accessible from London. If Amsterdam has connections like these, why not Brussels too?
DB, SNCB – please sort out your disputes and make it happen!
Back a couple of years ago when I lived in Brussels I was struck by the lack of good quality information online in English about life in the city. Too many people in Brussels for work in and around the EU institutions never see the best of Brussels, and the idea was to create a blog – www.brusselsblog.eu – that would address that need. The inspiration was drawn from the French language BXL Blog.
Anyway, I still own the domain name, WordPress is installed and running, and I have an initial expression of assistance from @bramsmets on Twitter. The need for the blog very much still exists. Anyone else want to chip in and help? If so please comment here, or contact me!
I’m a regular traveller on Eurostar, and I often travel onwards from Brussels to Germany by train, so much in fact that I am used to booking tickets of DB’s website. In the past I happened to discover that through tickets from Germany to London were cheaper than tickets booked from Belgium to London. It seems DB is muscling in on the Eurostar business before liberalisation of the channel tunnel is due in 2013.
Here then is a guide to how to get the cheapest Eurostar tickets on the London-Brussels route, using DB’s website rather than Eurostar.com. The standard price is €49.00 single, sometimes a saving of 50%. Continue reading
Yesterday and today NATO Foreign Ministers have been meeting in Berlin, no doubt an important meeting in light of the problems facing the mission in Libya. I also do not deny that these ministers are important people and are a possible target for extremists.
But is it really necessary to mess up the traffic and public transport in a city when they are meeting?
Here we go again. The next stage of the UK government’s effort to get more Brits into the EU institutions… is to try to skew the application system to assist Brits. Today’s FT has more on the story here. There’s more here about the government’s previous efforts.
The essential gist of the FT piece is that it’s the requirement to be able to speak a second language this is discouraging British applications, because so few Brits speak a second language. So remove the language requirement (i.e. make a special concours just for Brits) and all will be fine and dandy, and UK nationals will flood to Brussels.
Correlation, sure. But causation?
A pedestrian bumps into another pedestrian who is blocking the pavement.
The pedestrian gets a wet foot from a loose paving stone and clambers over bags of rubbish on the way to the Métro.
The same person takes the Métro, and when leaving the train at Gare du Midi he knocks into a passenger trying to board before he leaves the train.
He’s late for his train, and then when ascending the escalators from the Métro to the concourse other people are blocking the escalators. He asks them to move, he’s met with a ‘je m’en fous’ shrug and a snide comment, and a raging, verbal argument ensues.
By this point he’s so mad he shouts at an employee of the STIB, who hits him.
In Brussels it’s reasonably easy. There I was (and indeed still am) the EU politics blogger nerd. So if there are events and conferences to attend I go to ones about EU politics on the web first and foremost. Then I will go to ones about institutional reform or centre left politics. It’s all quite simple.
But not so in London. What is my role in this city? It’s a bit hard to define, and the events here demonstrate that.
I attended and ran a session at Netroots UK, but the session was on fundraising and not about blogging or networking or party politics. I couldn’t attend the Fabians’ New Year conference but suppose I would have pottered along and have been generally underwhelmed. The RSA today ran an event with Evgeny Morozov about Wikileaks and I hadn’t even realised it was happening…
This weekend is ukgovcamp but I am not public sector enough for that, so will not be there, even though I know most of the organisers. Policy Network are running an event entitled “What future for Europe?” – worth going to that as it’s one of the few big EU events in London? But I wouldn’t have gone to something like that when I lived in Brussels, it’s too general. The Fabians have something similar a week later. I’m a leftish blogger and Fabian member, but their event doesn’t even have a programme yet… I will for sure be at eCampaigning Forum in Oxford in March, primarily an event for NGO campaign folks, even though I have done rather little work in that sector since the Atheist Buses. Further into the future I’ll probably be at PdF in NYC in June and the World Humanist Congress in Oslo in August.
What a mess!
More worryingly all of this sums up my general confusion being in London. What am I here? Am I a web nerd? A web comms trainer? An EU training person? How much am I about intellectual stuff, how much about practical training? Am I better off working with the public sector, with political parties, with non-partisan campaigns, or with NGOs? How much EU stuff should I do? How much UK stuff? How much blogging? How much party politics, either offline or online? At the moment I’m trying to do all of that, working silly hours, and have a rubbish bank balance. Something isn’t right.
Ideas how to fix it?