Following my brief vacation in Denmark, I flew from Copenhagen to Brussels on Sunday afternoon. We had organised a 2-day workshop on foresight and scenario planning (as it applies to the intellectual property system in Europe) together with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, and so I would be in Brussels until Wednesday.
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I landed in Brussels, and as always I stopped to look at Tintin’s moon rocket in the arrivals hall of Brussels airport. I just love it, and every time I see it, it tells me that I have arrived in a place that I consider one of my “second homes”:
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After checking in at my hotel, hanging the suit in the closet etc., I met up with Paola, an Italian colleague from my department who also was part of our delegation. Unusually for someone who has worked in the EU system for several years, she had never been to Brussels, so of course I had to show her around a bit. We started at the Mannekin Pis, not least because across the street from the little boy is one of my favourite Brussels bars, Poechenellekelder:
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Another bar in the area distilled the essence of life into three words–drink, eat, piss:
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Afterwards, Paola and I went for dinner at a restaurant on Grand’ Place, without question the most beautiful square in Europe:
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On Monday morning it was time to start the workshop. I walked from my hotel to the Joint Research Centre, passing a square that made me a bit nostalgic, Square de Meeus, where I played catch with my then 6-year old son during our first summer in Brussels in 1995, when we lived in an apartment in that area for a couple of months before moving to the suburbs:
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Then the workshop got going. We had invited about 45 people, some from IP offices in Europe and elsewhere (Australia, Korea, Chile, Singapore, ARIPO, the African IP organisation), others from business, academia, finance (including a gentleman from the World Bank), international organisations like the OECD, and others. The idea was to spend two days discussing possible scenarios for the European IP system in 2045, under the guidance of the experts from the Joint Research Centre’s Policy Lab. The method was a mix of group discussions and working with Post-It notes:
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Before lunch, it was time for the group photo. Caroline from the JRC tries to arrange us:
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The first day is finished, but the JRC colleagues and we still have some work to do to digest the many ideas, and to prepare for the following day:
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But we also took the time to have some fun, as in this staged photo involving me and my two collaborators Juan and Damian:
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Meanwhile, Paola is busy writing some notes:
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In the evening, we had arranged a dinner at the hotel where most of the participants were staying. Here, Meindert Flikkema, a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, speaks with Manda Tay, a senior official at the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore:
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Zaida also works at the EU Intellectual Property Office in Alicante (that is where I work):
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The workshop continued on Tuesday:
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Finally the two days are over, and we take a photo of the organisers–me and my three colleagues, and the people of the Joint Research Centre. Now we have a lot of work to do with all the outputs of this workshop, and to prepare the second workshop in the spring:
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My three colleagues wanted to go back to the centre of Brussels for dinner, but I preferred to stay in the neighbourhood near my hotel since I had an early flight home the next day. It is one of my favourite neighbourhoods in Brussels, a part of Ixelles called Little Zaire or Matongé. As the name implies, it is a largely African area, but with quite a bit of diversity. There are many shops selling the kind of fruit and veg that people from Africa or the Caribbean use in their kitchens. This shop is on the beautifully named Rue de Longue Vie (“Street of the Long Life”):
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A travel agency, highlighting the kind of destinations that are of interest to the people of Matongé:
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Many inhabitants of Matongé hails from countries marked by internal strife or wars with neighbours. Hence this mural, advocating peace and dialogue in French and in various African languages:
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Matongé is full of small restaurants:
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I have walked past this statue in front of the Saint Boniface church literally hundreds of times, but only recently did I learn what it was. It is a memorial to Charles Woeste, a 19th century politician:
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I finished my walk at this bar/restaurant called L’Ultime Atome, one of my favourites in this part of Brussels. Great beer selection, good food, reasonable prices, nice atmosphere. What else could one want?
After dinner, I walked back to my hotel and packed–I needed to take the metro around 6:30 in the morning. On Wednesday, I made my way to the airport and flew home.
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I did not go to the office from the airport, but decided to work from home in the afternoon. A bit later, I went for a walk in the sunshine, enjoying the various sights of my neighbourhood:
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It is mid-November, but the weather still lends itself to this (although as I write this, at the end of the month, this is no longer the case, with temperatures rarely reaching 20C and falling as low as 5-6C at night):
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On Thursday afternoon I stopped on Plaza Montañeta in the centre. Christmas is approaching, and Alicante is showing definite signs of the season. Among them is the nativity display on Montañeta. It consists of 4 panels, one of which, depicting the central scene, was being readied:
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Interested onlookers:
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The display, created by one of the local associations de “belenistas” (the name comes from Belén, the Spanish name of Bethlehem):
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On Sunday morning I cycled to Aigues where these two cute creatures provided me with a nice contre-jour opportunity:
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I went to Busot, 8 km further, and took a brief rest near the hill where the cemetery is located. From that spot I had a good view of the health clinic, the cultural centre and the nursing home. For a town with just 3,600 inhabitants, Busot has good facilities (there is also a school, two churches, a few grocery stores and a bank, and of course several bars):
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In the afternoon, our friends Eliot and Assumpta had invited us for lunch at their house. An informal portrait of Eliot at the table:
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Assumpta. Like us, they are in their sixties:
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Assumpta’s son Alberto works as a chef in Madrid, having worked his way up from various jobs in the restaurant business:
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We had some nice things on the table during this long Sunday lunch:
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And the cute dog Balu kept us company throughout:
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