This week I was back in Belgium, but this time not in Brussels but in Liège, the biggest city in the French-speaking Wallonia region. It was a work trip, we were hosting the annual public sector representatives meeting there, because Belgium holds the rotating EU presidency this half-year. As always, I was able to mix work with pleasure–and to take some pictures.
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I woke up to a glorious Sunday morning, and since I needed to go to the bakery for bread, I took my camera and took several photos of the morning light on my street. This wall is about 100 m from my house:
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I continued my walk, looking down on the mundane features of the street, made pretty by the morning sun:
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The local punks have been studying English:
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After about 500 meters, I arrived at the seaside:
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I walked a short block along the beach, taking a selfie of sorts along the way:
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Monday morning I flew to Brussels with four colleagues from the office, and then we took the train to Liège. Stephanie was connected as always while the Belgian landscape whizzed by:
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After about an hour, we arrived at the very impressive Liège Guillemins train station, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2009:
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We arrived at our hotel and had a very filling late lunch, so in the evening there was no need for dinner. I walked to the heart of the old city, to the cathedral square, but the place was pretty quiet on a rainy Monday night. But walking back to the hotel, about 1.5 km, I enjoyed the view of the illuminated Albert 1er bridge over the Meuse river:
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Our hotel was next to the Liège congress centre on the shore of the river:
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On Tuesday morning it was time to start the 3 days of meetings we were hosting in Liège. We had not been able to get a meeting room at the congress centre next to our hotel, so we met at another meeting facility called BluePoint (which was actually pretty nice, although we needed a bus to transport ourselves and the delegates between there and the hotel):
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During the lunch break, the traditional “family photo” was taken, with Stephanie herding people into position:
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A rare portrait of me, here in good company:
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In late afternoon, my colleague Alexandra and I, who share an interest in art, walked to a modern art gallery called La Boverie, just a few hundred meters from our hotel:
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We were there to see a huge retrospective exhibition of works by American video artist Bill Viola. Video installations are usually not my cup of tea, but Viola’s work was on a completely different level from anything I had seen before. It is impossible to fully convey my impressions with still photos, but here are a few attempts, showing stills from two of the more than 20 installations on display:
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On Tuesday evening we had the traditional social dinner at a restaurant near the train station; not many photos from that, but I found the telephone cover of this Greek customs officer quite amusing:
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Our meeting continued on Wednesday morning, and during the coffee break I was prowling the room with my discrete little Ricoh GRIII camera:
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On Wednesday afternoon, we visited the customs at Liège airport. Since the focus of our meeting was infringement of IP rights, especially counterfeiting, such a visit was a nice practical supplement to the discussions in the meeting room. Liège aiport has virtually no passenger flights, most of those airlines use Brussels or Charleroi airports. But Liège is the main hub for Alibaba and for several carriers such as DHL, UPS etc. It receives between 30 and 60 million packages per month. Obviously it is impossible for customs agents working there to inspect them all, so they use various risk analysis approaches to select the ones that should be inspected. This is the area where suspect packages are held for inspection:
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No doubt about the origin of most of the air freight arriving here:
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Inspecting a package. Such toys seem harmless except that in the case of fakes, one does not know what colouring materials were used, or whether the small parts are more likely to come off and being swallowed by the child:
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These packages have been inspected and found not to contain anything problematic:
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In a corner of the huge hall there was a display of confiscated counterfeits (and yes, the customs people had assembled the huge Lego starship themselves):
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Fake medicines–swallow at your own risk:
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Fake sports shoes, one of the most frequently faked product category:
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Something potentially very dangerous, a counterfeit bicycle frame. I would not want to be descending at 65 km/h, as I do from time to time, on this thing:
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An idea of the cumbersome process of manual inspection. A package is opened:
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The contents are photographed for transmission to the owner of the brand that has been (potentially) faked:
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On Thursday morning, we continued with a seminar on counterfeit goods, organised together with the Belgian authorities. My colleague Blanca is moderating a panel; the person speaking is Peter Hedin from the Swedish patent office, an old friend:
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A different panel, on the impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, moderated by my fellow Polish economist, Piotr Stryszowski from the OECD, with representatives from industry and enforcement. The man on the left is one of the customs officers from Liège aiport whom we had met on Wednesday, and we liked his presentation (and his English was good too), so we invited him on the spot to speak the next day, and to our delight he accepted. It is always good to get the perspective of someone “on the ground”:
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Later on Thursday, I was back at the train station, together with Blanca and a former colleague Charo, who used to work in our office but is now with the ministry of culture in Madrid. We were travelling back to Spain together:
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I photographed the two ladies making a selfie:
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Back in Alicante, on Friday I met for lunch with a group of friends. We are a group of men, calling ourselves “Les 8 Salopards” (they are all Spanish, but many have a connection to Algeria and so French is also frequently used), who take turns selecting a restaurant to have lunch once a month. This time the place was in the centre of Alicante. It was called Bodegas Gambin, and while it does not look fancy, the food is excellent, and inexpensive. We started with drinks and munchies:
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Then came the main attraction:
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The food is examined and commented upon. The Salopards like informal settings and manners but the food is taken seriously:
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The nice lady (who I think is the co-owner of the place) opening yet another bottle of wine for us:
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The food eaten, considerable time was spent on friendly banter. These lunches last at least 3 hours:
More photos from the Bill Viola exhibition in Liège can be seen in my “art in Belgium” gallery, starting with this image, and continuing by clicking on the arrow on the right, and there are some more images from the city of Liège here.