Well, with that piece of housekeeping out of the way I'll get started with my much-overdue update. It's been busy here with work and all! Since I left you at the cliffhanger of work's commencement, I'll pick right back up there.
I knew work was going to be exciting when I heard day one would consist of being escorted to NATO Headquarters for the first day of a two-day Council meeting. After having to be at the office at 7:45 AM...a bus took myself and much of the ATA Council delegation (including political leaders from about 30 countries) to the NATO HQ building. I got to sit on on their discussions with NATO where there was an open forum for the country chapters to express what concerns they have, what they've been up to in the past year, and NATO informed ATA of the same sorts of things. It was so interesting to hear things from countries openly expressing things there not happy with about the NATO-ATA relationship to serious discussions about common international security threats. Some other interesting points I noticed were that they are very interested in talking about fostering the next generation of political actors, and want to increase the amount of things like younger political journal publications and conferences. They also are very concerned with cyber security.
---Side note: NATO HQ lunch included a fish course, a main course, a coffee course, and a dessert course at which I was seated at one point next to the ATA President, and spent much of the rest of the lunch making small talk with Italy's representative (who loves espresso and pasta-surprise surprise)---
Myself and one of my supervisors (fairly young, a couple years out of grad school, Canadian, studied in Israel for counter-terrorism, very smart and full of good career tips) left NATO early to go back to ATA offices to set up for the next day of the council meeting which we hosted on site. This preparation involved an insane amount of copying and prepping packets for the day which was greatly hindered efficiency-wise by a lack of printer ink...let's just say I was at the copier a while.
No matter, still a cool day. And the next day was equally interesting! I was doing a lot more active work during this one-helping people discreetly (like Mr. Italy who needed some documents handled) and making sure the meeting ran smoothly. It was a lot of different presentations about ATA updates such as financials, the year's events and so on. There were also speakers from NATO Parliament, a professor, German Marshall Fund, and more. One of the speakers was the American chapter head, Fran Burwell, who gave a very interesting speech on US-Euro relations and I made a point of introducing myself to at lunch. She happens to be head of the American chapter of the Atlantic Council in DC, gave me her card, and encouraged me to stop by :). Not bad for work day 2.
Day 3 involved us in the office for our first normal day. We got introduced to office norms, got my desk, and a work email. I work in the same room as the younger supervisor (Jason) and I don't think I've mentioned this, but also another intern from my program, Cassandra, but she is a grad student. My first project was listening to the recording of the Council meeting day 2 and transcribing minutes-a lengthly task. After that I began organizing the contact list data which entailed going through all of the business cards not entered yet-they were numerous. It took me a couple days in fact. Since Monday of that week was a national holiday, and fridays aren't work days for our program, it was then the weekend! An impromptu google search produced the information that Megabus in fact is in Europe! And for the low price of 12 euro, one can get to Amsterdam! So....myself and what turned out to be just one other of my classmates left Friday afternoon, booked a hostel, and stayed two nights in Amsterdam, and returned Sunday. After becoming slightly too familiar with the relentless rainfall of Brussels, we couldn't believe it when the weekend brought sun! Scroll through some of these pics to get an idea of our weekend-we even rented a paddleboat!
"r" for Rachael!
Casually some tappers practicing on the canal boardwalk...
Was feeling a bit artsy...
Got a tip off to check out this HUGE open-air market. Even got some freshly squeezed orange, pineapple, coconut juice!
After walking all around the city, we wanted to stop by and see the highly-recommended Van Gogh Museum. We got a tip-off that it would be busy so we saved it for the late afternoon. But when we first walked by at about 4 it still had a 45 minute line. But I noticed that you can get in a shorter line if you print tickets, and our hostel had a printer so we took a short 30 minute nap until our online booking time and headed back--of course there was now NO line but what can you do. I hope you recognize some of these! It was really cool. Learned a lot about him too. Apparently Van Gogh was no natural painter, actually wanted to be a drawer, and had to use a lot of tools such as making grids because he had no real natural spacial or depth perception.
Also saw... (the outside of...) the Anne Frank House!...Line=40 minutes, and 15 euros...
The weekend we were in Amsterdam was also the soccer finals, so it was a really fun atmosphere in the city. During the night all the bars and cafes had fans and the games playing on the tv, and people were all super friendly and it made for a great community feel, so we pretty much stayed in the area right by our hostel during the evenings (which was the museum district) which had a nice square with many restaurants of the like. One of them even had a local artist concert event saturday night-very good.
But the weekend came to a close, we caught our Megabus back to Brussels, and it was back to the office on Monday.
Being a truly internationally-focused office, Monday Cassandra and myself were alone since our coworkers had work travel. Since I only got a little of the way through the contact data, I worked on that for the rest of Monday. Tuesday, I got to go to...European Parliament!! Because I did the monotonous task of re-listening and creating minutes of the Council meeting, my reward was representing ATA at a conference on EU as a Peacemaker: Mediation. The event was all day and included multiple panels of Parliament members, EU delegates, UN representatives, and more. It was incredibly interesting to hear all the work they do. I received a name tag, a gift USB, and talked with some cool people, such as a German woman about to start her PhD on this subject and was there for background info. The room was very large and, on the perimeter, had two stories of translation booths for 30 languages. My victory of the day was, for the speeches in french, I didn't need the headsets! And they were talking about politics! I did however need it for the German....A very cool day all in all.
The rest of the week included many cool tasks mainly working with the main supervisor-Giuseppe. He's an Italian-French-English-Arabic speaking young professional who is another wealth of knowledge and is Secretary General of the ATA. My first task was creating a formal report of the conference I attended since the reason I was sent was because they don't have time to go to all of these, so use us interns to get the information and then distribute it to all country chapters as well. So I felt the pressure a bit, but definitely was proud of what I produced.
It was a very fun week because Giuseppe needed my french to help edit a letter to a Naval Officer concerning an event they're organizing with the ATA and I was able to compose and edit Giuseppe's french (I even think my french is a bit better than his :) ). I also got to write a highlight piece summarizing the Council meeting for the ATA website and I got to use the website login and do the online publishing myself...and you can even check it out! It's called "ATA Council Spring Gathering on May 21 and 22, 2013" and flashes by on the home page picture reel Definitely glad I have a bit of newspaper background. Also, since I did that, Jason asked me to do the same sort of thing for a different conference I didn't even attend, but was able to write about using some speech notes and looking at the event's agenda. That one will be up soon too. I also started this week researching local Brussels-based credible journalists to create a reference list for ATA to use when they need reporting done and consolidating it into a spreadsheet. I definitely kept busy and I'm realizing I'm really liking the dynamic nature of the international NGO work.
Fun fact: The housekeeping came on monday, and she only speaks french. I talked with her for about five minutes until she asked where I was from, and was extremely surprised to hear I came from the US, because "My french was so good and she almost never meets anybody from the US who can speak french really." She also was confused how I could know french only by going to school and not having really studied or lived abroad. She was really nice and has an interesting life, she is Egyptian and speaks Egyptian arabic as well. I also got the phone handed to me multiple times when people called the office in french and I am the most fluent one...I guess I'm getting a hang of this whole second language thing. :)
We also had two lectures this week since last week's got rescheduled for this week. Jerry has been enlightening us on EU structure and functions and I already feel I probably know more about the EU then American politics...perhaps I should work on that.
This weekend has been good so far. Thursday night the EU hosted a youth festival by the Parliament and had outdoor music and all the restaurants and bars were serving outside. Last night myself and my friends, Kelly-the one who went to Amsterdam-, and Matt, went on about an hour long train to Liege, another nice town in Belgium, to see a DJ who is a friend of one of Kelly's friends in New York. Small world. Apparently he's pretty well-known because Selena Gomez (singer, originally an actress on Disney Channel, dated Justin Bieber) tweeted about the event before we headed out. Very good music. Tomorrow hopefully we'll be doing some local touristy things like the Atomium (check it out online if you haven't heard of it!), and then it's back to the grind on Monday but I'll save that for another post.
Also ran into this little guy one day walking home! They're everywhere here...instead of slugs I guess.
Absolutely amazing!
ReplyDeletebtw, what is with all of the sentences that start with "myself" Has speaking French ruined your English grammar?
ReplyDelete