It's a Wednesday



I don't know, I'm not feeling creative for a headline here. Things that have happened recently - I've overcome, more or less, my down phase of last week (I feel so odd posting things like this on a web page, but then I guess that's what a blog is about and I've been going on about it...) and anyway I have lots of work now to keep me busy! I'm organising two events, i.e. conferences and stuff, in December, and I'm also supposed to have designed and conceptualised a calendar teaching kids about human rights within the next 10 days. One of the conferences is about the European Neighbourhood Policy - it's supposed to get people from the government and civil society together and come up with recommendations for an action plan for this policy. And the other one.....is meant to help found a new political movement, but then this sounds so weird. It's all about capacity building and all of that. You know what I mean...

So last week I went to see this concert inside the "Dome" I was talking about before. It actually looks quite nice on the inside, but when you see this thing from the outside you really wonder how it can still hold up. Apparently they've had a huge techno party in it a few years ago which is now famous for the amount of drugs that were abused there. I tried to take a close-up of my favourite musician, the very cool grandpa bass player, but unfortunately it didn't really turn out.

I've also been to a two-day conference about Euro-Mediterranean relations. The food there was quite good and they gave away lots of freebies, but as far as the outcome it was pretty much zero if you ask me. The Minister of Telecommunications was there to talk about the fight against terrorism - he recently escaped a car bombing himself. It was a little odd because when anybody talks about terrorism in Europe, people usually talk about definitions, or networks, or other grand concepts. This discussion however was very much focused on details - which security service is listening to which kind of phone conversations? Strangely, there was also some French General there who was talking about security services in Europe. According to him, terrorism is of course something to worry about, but at least we should count ourselves fortunate because there are no more wars between "great powers" - as he put it, "la guerre a prise un bon coup derriere les oreilles". Thank you for this opinion! I'm sure it went down well with the car-bombed Minister or any other people in the audience who have any kind of war experience. Anyway, I mostly think the discussion was STRANGE. A colleague of mine told me today she saw me on TV when this event was broadcast (the TV people arrived and left together with the Minister), sitting in the audience and looking bored.

I also went to the famous Gemmayzeh cafe to smoke Argileh and have Lebanese food the other day - good stuff! (Luckily I can eat again by this point).