Let's pick up where we left off. Sunday was pretty lackluster, but I did make it down to Brussels' waterfront district. By 'waterfront district' I mean 'overpriced seafood restaurant central'. It turns out ninety percent of the stores and restaurants here are closed on Sundays, too, something that the ones remain open are definitely aware of. A decent meal of waterzooi runs me thirty euros and adds an element of frustration to my thirst. Thank God there's a place with 40 different brews on draught a little ways down the road. I'm most intrigued by the one labelled 'Band of Brothers S01E01' but decide Goebbels and Goering can stay out of my drinking life.
First day of work arrives. Even the jet lag waking me up three hours early isn't enough to get myself sorted in time, and I repeatedly cut myself shaving and barely make my train on time. As in, I book it to the station and jam one arm in the door to force my way in. I am nothing if not consistent. At least this job gives me an excuse to rock an Italian suit for eight hours a day. P Diddy WISHES he could wake up feeling like I look. Arriving at the Parliament itself is a bit on an experience: the place is fucking huge. I don't know what I expected with about 10,000 Eurocrats in one building, but this looks like the sort of place Palpatine would feel at home at. My role here is to help out one Mr. Zeller, a Member of the European Parliament, but as he's in Poland keeping a foot on those peoples' throats I meet up with his two full-time assistants instead. They lead me to some sort of info session that only succeeds in going further and further over my head, with the most memorable detail being the fact that waiters serve you coffee and mineral water every hour or so. Things really get kickstarted in the afternoon when I get assigned to take notes on the Committee on Foreign Affairs session. The committee chamber is swarming with MEPs, media and all sorts of people more important than me as we take in first a session on a full week's worth of coups, rebellions and ethnic conflicts across Africa. You know how you always see those videos of UN sessions where the representatives of each country are wearing headphones and getting the speeches translated into their own language live? Yeah. We have those. One of the English translators sounds identical to David Attenborough. I keep expecting him to lapse into a description of penguin mating habits in the middle of explaining the military coup in Guinea-Bissau, but he disappoints. An Albanian delegation featuring the foreign minister and deputy PM (picture below) also gives a self-congratulatory conference on their progress towards EU integration. I have never had such a huge poli sci boner. This bodes very well.
Tuesday involves much of the same. It's pretty clear the two assistants don't really know what to do with me, but this entails me showing up at 10 am and spending all day attending conferences on the Timoshenko trial in Ukraine and watching movies on things like human rights in Chechnya, so I'm all smiles. The most exciting part of the day comes when I'm informed that there's really nothing for me to do on Wednesday at all, so I can go ahead and make my weekend a full five days. The new deputy PM of Libya is giving a conference on his country's upcoming first-ever elections. He's pretty positive about their situation and cites the nice stat that they managed to register over two million voters (out of a population of six million) in two weeks. Knowing the rest of the story, I'm more skeptical about the prospects for successful democratizing a country where the majority of the population is angry, unemployed young men, each of whom has his own tribal loyalty and a Kalashnikov to back it up. Sounds like another state I know *cough*AFGHANISTAN*cough*. A week in is probably too early to start hammering foreign delegates, however, so I let the rebels and NATO hacks jerk each other off some more before calling it quits for the week.
My plans for the weekend are initially pretty grand, and they start off well. Wednesday morning I book a hostel in Ghent and head up to Flanders for the weekend. On the train there I'm subjected to my first real experience listening to Dutch. I consider myself pretty open-minded, but god damn if that isn't one disgusting sounding language. It sounds like a chimpanzee trying to read a German textbook with a mouthful of Skittles, and every four or five syllables he chokes on one and produces this wretched guttural noise. Despite this, Ghent is a pretty impressive city and I even find myself doing something I never thought possible: appreciating artwork. I spend half the day wandering the city and the other half downing Belgian beers before stopping in at my hostel, which, being a Wednesday, is pretty dead. There's only one other guy in the room with me, so I try and make friends with him. He's apparently Slovenian despite looking more like Castro than any Slav I've ever seen, and we manage a broken conversation in Russian. I have no worries. I go to sleep. Silly me.
I wake up around nine. The Slovenian is gone, but I think nothing of it. I shower. I eat breakfast. I start packing my things. I check my wallet. Weird, it's empty. I check it again. That's funny, I could have sworn I had about three hundred euros in it. Oh wait. I DID. Unless they ascended to the Promised Land last night there's only one possibility. I am seeing red. I can barely breathe. Too bad I left the nuclear launch codes in my other pants. This dirty, sleazy, communist motherfucker fished my wallet out of my jeans and robbed me blind as I slept not six inches away. I talk to the hostel owner, get his name and passport number and file a police report, but unfortunately real life is not a Nicholas Cage movie and there's not much else I can do. But mark my words, Rafael Roman, Slovenian passport number 116516: if I ever find you I will flay you alive with a potato peeler and drink every drop of your greasy, Stalin-fucking communist blood.
The rest of the weekend is very pleasant. I make my way to Bruges and spend an afternoon sipping rare beers and enjoying some good conversation with some people who aren't fucking assholes. This includes a former American senator (according to him, at any rate) and a sweet Danish couple. Friday was more beer in Bruges, and today revolved around a trip to the Delirium cafe in central Brussels. Obviously any place serving 2000+ different brews was high on my list, and the rest of the clientele was pretty decent, especially the Russian girl I ended up chatting with. I was thoroughly enjoying our conversation and got a couple chances to look smarter than I really am by dropping some slick Russian phrases, but the emotionless Soviet mother on the other side of her didn't seem to find the hammer and sickle on my shirt very amusing. I thought everyone enjoyed dictatorships of the proletariat? Either way I'm tired and going to stop enlightening you all now. Tune in next week when I fix the Eurozone debt crisis.
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