Rush Hour in Berlin

Due to a mixture of geographic and lifestyle factors, Berlin doesn't have much of a 'rush hour' to speak of.

I have a genuine question for Berliners - is there anything resembling a rush hour in this city? Perhaps it's the area in which I reside or the nature of my work, but after four months of living here I have yet to see any difference in traffic patterns or public transport ridership during the traditional commuting times of the day.

Maybe it just seems comparatively inactive because I'm coming from Brussels, which sees bumper-to-bumper gridlock throughout the city from 7h to 10h and 16h to 19h. I've noticed that it's only gotten worse since they closed Boulevard Anspach, the main thoroughfare in central Brussels, to pedestrianise it. During my Brussels weeks these past months I've seen traffic at an absolute standstill. I'm heading to Belgium tomorrow for another Brussels week, and I expect to spend much of the week sitting in traffic.

The case of the disappearing Brussels journos

Take a good look at the Brussels press corps, because in a few years it may have disappeared into thin air. That's at least the concern running through the EU capital at the moment, as the number of accredited journalists in the city plummets.

Today I stopped by an extraordinary meeting of the International Press Association (API) that was called together to specifically address this question. I had come by because my company is dealing with a separate issue, the harassment of journalists working in the International Press Centre by the Belgian authorities. As it turns out though, these two issues are probably not unrelated.

In 2005 there were 1,300 accredited reporters in Brussels, more than the Washington press corps (a fact the EU was very proud of at the same time). Today, according to a blog this week by the Economist, the number is just 752. Well, 753 as of yesterday, when I received my accreditation. In the past year alone, almost 200 journalists have left Brussels.

The API meeting was called to approve a resolution demanding immediate action from the EU to stop the hemorrhaging of Brussels journalists. A noble aim to be sure. But during the meeting I couldn't help but feel perplexed by the remedies that API is demanding.

First week in Brussels

Well I made it to Brussels in one piece, and I’m halfway through my first working week here. The move went very smoothly, and the transition to being here full-time hasn’t been all that jarring considering I lived here for a month last year and have been coming to the office here about once a month over the past year. Still, it should be a very different experience living here than it was just working here.

Given that I moved my whole life in five suitcases via train (with the help of my saint of a boyfriend), it was almost eery how much this seemed like a non-event. I never felt very stressed about it, didn’t spend much time packing and generally didn’t think about the whole thing very much at all. I guess I really do have this moving thing down to a science now.

Moving to Brussels, Part 2

Well it’s official – I signed the lease for a studio apartment in the St. Catherine area of Brussels yesterday. Flat-hunting turned out to be relatively painless. I looked at some really nice places. It’s insane how cheap rent is in Brussels, if I had gone with an unfurnished apartment I could have gotten a really nice place that I could never afford in London or New York. But I decided to go with a furnished smaller place with a cheaper rent. There’s really no reason I need a big one-bedroom apartment, and I’d rather use that saved money to get out of Brussels frequently! And I was really not looking forward to the prospect of having to furnish a place, especially when I don’t know how long this little Brussels adventure will last.

This is, after all, essentially a trial. I’ll still be a UK employee on a temporary (one year) secondment in Brussels. Once that year is up (or possibly sooner) it will be time to decide how I like living in Brussels. I gave it a little test last year for a month, but spending the full year there will really let me see if it’s somewhere I can live comfortably.

London plans ‘USA Day'?? I'm out of here!

Well it’s been up in the air for awhile now but today it became official: my company is moving me to Brussels. I will be heading over there 1 March.

In the past year of doing this job covering the EU I’ve been living in London (where the company is based) and just going into Brussels when required. But someone in our Brussels office is leaving, so I need to be over there full-time now. I’m looking forward to it actually. Covering the EU from London has been a bit like trying to cover the US Congress from New York. You can do it (people do) but you can’t do it very well. Sure, you can hop on a Eurostar or Amtrak train to attend the key hearings, press conferences and events. But if you’re not immersed in the EU or DC bubble, you’re just not fully connected

Songs, Sailing and Slaughter in Denmark

“Don’t worry, we will try it again.” The headmaster’s frustrated yet encouraging words were met with smirks and giggles by the journalists around the piano struggling to keep a straight face as we half-heartedly sang ‘Let it Be’. One had to admire his tenacity in trying to convert this group of hardened (and tone-deaf) international journalists to his lifestyle of self-enlightenment through group singing of ‘60’s hippie anthems, all sung out of a small blue-binded book that resembled a church hymnal.

I was part of a group of journalists being led on a tour of Denmark taking a look at environment-related projects they have there. As a base we stayed at a “folk high school” in central Jutland overlooking a beautiful lake, normally populated by young adults on a quest to find themselves (a quest that is half government-funded I might add). The headmaster’s efforts to teach us the ways of being in harmony with the earth were quite adorable, if in the end unsuccessful. We may have been environment reporters, but we’re still cynical journalists after all!

Yet as cynical as we were, you didn’t have to be a hippie to be impressed by Denmark’s pioneering green efforts. The tour was linked in to the hugely important UN climate change summit that will be held in Copenhagen in December. The meeting was pushed three years ago by Denmark with the intention of giving nations a firm deadline by which to be ready for a worldwide agreement on how to combat climate change. Denmark has been a natural leader in this fight, having been one of the earliest movers in environmental legislation. It was the first country to establish an environment ministry in 1973. Since a dispute with OPEC in the ‘70’s it has weaned itself almost completely off oil, now getting its electricity from a mixture of renewable energy and coal. It set up its first wind turbines in the 70’s and today wind power provides 20% of Denmark’s power generation (renewables in total provide 28%), The country is well positioned to meet the EU’s requirement of 30% energy consumption from renewables by 2020, and it is planning to go even further.

Seasick Journos

We were on our way to visit one of these wind turbine farms far out in the North Sea on Tuesday when some of us realized we were in for more than we had bargained for. We were taken out for the 8 hour sea voyage in a small wooden boat which, though beautiful, took us for a wild ride as we bounced up and down on the tempestuous sea. It was quite an experience, and as the wooden boat creaked and moaned its way out from the Danish port of Estbjerg in Southwest Jutland, I could really get a sense of what ye olde long sea voyages must have been like (i.e., not pleasant!).



As we neared the windfarm site of Horns Rev, feared by sailors for centuries because of its wild winds and shallow waters, the boat began to literally leap up and down from the sea, and we all had to hold on to keep from being knocked over. A number of the journalists started losing their lunch over the side of the boat. Luckily I had taken a motion sickness tablet in the morning so I was ok.

When we finally reached the garden of turbines jutting majestically up from the sea, it was undeniably impressive. These things are massive, rising 115 metres into the air. The blades alone are 45 metres in length. Much of the objection to setting up wind turbines has been that they make a lot of noise, and yet I can attest that even though these blades are the size of a football pitch, I couldn’t hear anything even when the ship was right next to them (granted, the waves were pretty loud). Just one of these turbines supplies energy to 2,200 households. In total the whole Horns Rev site provides 350,000 households with power.

But the project hasn’t been an unblemished success. When they first installed the turbines there was a problem with the gears. Essentially they weren’t strong enough to handle the massive amount of wind in this area of the ocean. So all of the turbines had to be retrofitted with new motors, costing wind turbine company Vestas a massive amount to fix them.

We met with the CEO of Vestas on Wednesday, and I asked him about their recent decision to pull out of the UK which has resulted in demonstrations and a plant takeover on the Isle of Wight. He said straight up that the UK is not an attractive market for investment in onshore wind power right now, and now that the US has opened up as a renewables market with the Obama administration’s climate bill, they are focusing their energy there. That may be making the UK government quite nervous, as environment minister Ed Milliband just announced a big target for wind energy in the UK. Does this target reflect economic reality when the private sector seems to be wary of wind in the UK? I’m working on an article on this topic for the September ENDS Europe report.

Clean Houses and Dirty Waste

I actually had the opportunity on this junket to do two things I had also done on the Holland junket in June – visit a waste incineration plant and an energy-generating house.

It was interesting to compare and contrast the Dutch and Danish versions of these two things. The waste incineration plant was pretty similar, both in terms of its capacity to generate electricity and district heating and in its set-up. But the energy house was different in some significant ways. Whereas the Dutch version had been specifically designed to look like an average home and to be affordable in scale, the Danish house we looked at was designed as a luxury home.

I have to admit, the one in Denmark was a gorgeous house. It had an enormous amount of windows, meant to reduce the need to use lights during the day but that were also able to stop the sun from heating up the interior by being recessed. It also had a wind/temperature reading device at the top that would adjust the settings in the house to be the most energy-efficient. It would use its calculation of the speed and direction of the wind and temperature to automatically open and shut windows in the house and close/open shades. The entire thing was controlled by this futuristic control panel in the kitchen that gave out readings for the energy use of the whole home.

However the cost, at 5 million Danish crowns, would be prohibitive for any middle-class family in Denmark. Looking at it I got the impression I was seeing the house of the future, but perhaps not the practical energy-efficient house of today. It definitely looked nicer than the Dutch house, with almost unnoticeable solar panels built right into the roof as opposed to the obvious ones on the roof of the Dutch house (and also no wind turbine, which was good because the turbine on the roof of the Dutch house didn’t look very nice). But realistically, could anyone really afford to live in the Danish luxury house?

Both Denmark and the Netherlands are one of the few countries to offer feed-in tariffs for households with solar panels or wind turbines, letting customers actually output the excess energy they generate into the power grid. They then build up a credit with the power company and they can work off that credit when they need to take in energy from the grid at night whhile the sun isn’t out (a battery for just one house would be prohibitively expensive even for the luxury home). One interesting difference though was that in the Dutch house, if you didn’t use all the excess energy you had generated at day during the night, the power company would pay you for the leftover energy. In the Danish feed-in tariff system, that payment is not available.

Next week I’m going to pop up to Camden in London to take a look at such an energy house in the UK, where there is no feed-in tariff regime available at all. With the UK rather notoriously lacking in sunlight, I wonder how this Camden house can possibly be cost-effective.

Green Slaughterhouses

One of our final stops yesterday was at the main Danish Crown abattoir outside Arhus. It’s the second largest slaughterhouse in Europe, in a country which leads the continent in pork exports. It kills an astonishing 87,000 pigs a week (17,500 every weekday) and we saw the whole process from start to finish. The facility is brand new, and almost everything in it is automatic. Each pig is stunned, killed, bled, gutted, chopped up and ready in less than a minute.

I’d never seen a slaughterhouse before, and wondered how I would react to it. It’s kind of a gross thing to watch, but as a meat-eater I felt I’m obligated to watch the process. It actually wasn’t all that surprising, in fact it was cleaner and more efficient than I was expecting. The actual moment of death was fascinating to watch, a man shoves a blade into each pigs throat one after the other in rapid succession as they come through hanging on a conveyor belt, limp and unconscious. It’s an almost constant in-out-in-out with the blade. Gruesomely efficient. Seeing it didn’t really change my opinion about eating meet. I’m dating a vegetarian right now and my flatmate is one as well, so I get a lot of pressure to convert.

After the slaughterhouse we went next door to see the biogas plant that uses the fat and unused organs from the pigs to produce biodiesel for use in cars. The EU has set a discretionary target for using biodiesel, although this is a bit up in the air now given the controversy over ethanol disrupting food supply. Biodiesel from animal fat is really the “good” kind of such fuel, as it’s made from animal parts that would just have been thrown out anyway rather than from food that could have been eaten.

Uncover the Bridge!

I spent Wednesday evening in Arhus, which is really a lovely town. It was amazing to see its transformation from a rather gritty port to a lovely preserved Scandinavian town. The river running through it had long ago been covered over and made into a road, with the water running under it in pipes (something unfortunately done in many European cities during industrialisation). But earlier this decade they decided to uncover it, making an actual river with a lovely pedestrian walkway running along it. We were given a tour by an architect instrumental in the design, who is now also involved in the redevelopment of the port into a knowledge-based business centre. Seeing the results, I wondered if the same thing could be accomplished in Brussels, where the Senne river was covered up a century ago. It would certainly go a long way in making Brussels a nicer place to be, something it badly needs.

Overall it was impressive to see all the green progress Denmark has made, and it was interesting to hear the observations and comparisons by the other journalists from around the world. Just like on the Holland trip we had a significant contingent from Brazil, who were particularly interested in the biodiesel. And once again I was the only American in the group.

Sitting in the main hall at the folk high school, I had a rather funny experience that showed how much my self-identification has changed over the past three years. At one point the headmaster was telling a story about an epiphany he had in Africa on a safari, and he was about to say something unflattering about some Americans with him there (Americans are often used as a foil in European anecdotes!) when he stopped and checked – “Oh, do we have any Americans here tonight?” There was a period of silence, and then I suddenly realized everyone was looking at me. “Oh right, I’m kind of American, I guess” I said sheepishly. I had literally forgotten for a minute there! Perhaps I only remember I’m American when people are telling flattering stories, not when someone’s about to launch into a diatribe. But usually, European stories about Americans fall into the second category!

All in all a fun trip. Now I’ve got two whole weeks in London without travel. Time to relax!

Jetting Around Jutland

I'm in Denmark this week, on a press tour organsied by the Danish government showing journalists different environmental sites around the country. I'm in Copenhagen tonight, came a bit early to spend the weekend here and visit some friends. I was last here two years ago, so it's good to be back. It's a beautiful city.

Tomorrow we're heading out to Jutland, the mainland part of Demark (that "juts" out into the North Sea. It should be pretty interesting. On Tuesday we'll be taking a boat out to an offshore windfarm out in the North Sea off the Western coast. We're also staying in a "folk high school" which is a form of live-in adult education popular in Northern Europe.

I suppose I'll be blogging about the trip when I'm back in London on Friday, until then here's a map of where I'll be going. Being an environmental journalist kind of rocks!


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Naked Fiddlers in the Swedish Mountains

The final press conference of the EU environment and energy ministers meeting in Åre, Sweden has just concluded, and I'm now on the bus that will bring me across the border to Norway. This was my first time covering an EU ministerial, and overall it was a really interesting experience. I made lots of contacts and got a few decent stories, but perhaps the most valuable aspect of the trip was observing the interaction between the Brussels press corps and EU officials.

I was rather surprised by the high level of security at the meeting. After all, these are only energy and environment ministers, and we're out in the middle of nowhere in Åre, a ski resort deep in the center of the country, seven hours by train from Stockholm. There were security guards everywhere, and even the accredited journalists were very restricted in where we could and couldn't go. Are environment ministers really prime targets for destabilising elements? I mean, I don't even know who most of them are, and I cover this area!

Saving the Earth Dutch Style

This week I was in Holland, being shuttled around the country on a press tour showing journalists various environmental projects. I know it’s almost cliché to say this at this point, but coming from the Anglo-Saxon world I couldn’t help but feel a bit ashamed at how much further along countries like the Netherlands are in developing sustainable solutions to climate change. Many of these solutions have been being developed since long before climate change became a prominent issue, and people have largely gotten used to the adjustments they’ve had to make to their daily lives. One example was this houseboat, pictured right.

The other journalists on this tour were an interesting mix, coming within Europe from Brussels, Germany, Denmark, Spain and the Czech Republic as well as further afield from China, India, Brazil and South Africa. It was interesting to hear everyone’s comparisons with what’s going on in their home countries, particularly the developing BRIC countries.

There were also interesting comparisons we could make between countries in the EU, particularly with Denmark and Germany which are also quite far along in developing sustainability projects. One funny detail was that many of the Dutch presenters for the projects would wistfully say that what they have might be good, but it’s nothing compared to what they have in Germany. This made my German colleague laugh, because in Germany apparently they always think of Dutch as having the height of green achievement. Two such modest peoples!

One of the more interesting sites we visited was energy-from-waste incineration plant in Amsterdam called the Waste and Energy Company, a public utility.

Having never seen a trash incineration plant before, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But I had plenty of pre-conceived notions about massive industrial plants spewing out plumes of noxious gas they torch piles of needless human waste. When our bus pulled up it looked like this was going to be the reality, as we could immediately see two giant smokestacks pouring white smoke into the air. However once inside and given a tour, I was surprised by many of the things I learned about the plant. The facility, which processes over 1.4 million tonnes of municipal and industrial waste annually, is actually the largest waste processor at a single location in the world. Two freight trains and 600 garbage trucks deliver trash to the facility each day.

Gross right? But astonishingly, the facility is able to recycle nearly 99% of the waste it receives. It does so by using the heat produced from burning the garbage to generate energy, much like a coal plant burns coal to produce energy. The facility produces 1 million MWh of electricity per year, enough to cover three quarters of Amsterdam households. All of Amsterdam’s public transportation is powered from the plant, as well as all street lights. The plant also uses the excess hear generated during the burning to provide businesses and homes with heat and hot water. Thus two environmental issues are solved: what to do with garbage and how to create energy without using finite resources like oil, coal and gas.

That’s all well and good, you may say, but what about the toxic emissions that are produced from the burning process? Well the AEB plant has devised a way to treat this. During the burning process, the steam (which drives the turbine) is separated from the smoke, and the smoke is then extensively filtered through flue-gas cleaning, which actually takes up 2/3 of the whole plant! By a process of separation, new materials are extracted from the gas. The sulphur recovered is used for the production of plaster board and blocks for the building industry, and the calcium chloride extracted can be used to defrost roads in winter. And the metal waste that can’t be burned is extracted, ground into bottom ash, and made into artificial sand for use in the construction of roads and buildings. In the end 99% of the impurities are filtered out. That smoke I saw coming out of the building? Only water vapour.

Still, energy-from-waste plants remain highly controversial. Many argue that although they do reduce CO2 emissions, they provide perverse incentive for governments to do nothing about the amount of waste generated by their societies. Additionally, such plants will always generate some pollution and the facilities can also be dangerous if there are accidents. Green groups in the UK have been particularly aggressive in opposing such plants, defeating plans for them in every council that has considered it.

Another interesting site we visited was a house outside of Amersfoort which generated its own energy. Apparently this has been increasingly done with new home construction in the Netherlands, as the government has started a feed-in program where homes that generate excess electricity can give it to the power grid and be paid for it. With this particular home, the solar panels and wind turbine on the roof generate more electricity than the house needs during the day, so that electricity is sold to the state and put into the wider grid. At night, when the sun is down, the house buys electricity from the grid, but it buys less electricity than it sells during the day so the homeowner actually makes a profit. The house also has many other energy-savings tricks including a special type of insulation made of Styrofoam (pictured left). But at the same time it looks like any other house, with a typical 1930's boxy Netherlands design (pictured above).

All in all it was an interesting trip. It was especially interesting talking to all the other journalists, especially the ones from Brussels. It actually made me excited for my move there in the Autumn. This weekend I'm in Zurich, Sunday is Father's Day in the US and UK so I thought I'd come here for it. I'm basically living at Heathrow Airport these days! After this I have a few straight weeks in the UK though. Well, at least 2 weeks. Hopefully we'll get some sunshine in London finally.

Back in London

I thought I would write a quick update on where I am and what the heck I'm doing. I just got a full-time job reporting on EU environmental issues for a news service. I'll be working from the company's headquarters in London at first, and then in the Autumn I'll be moving back to Brussels to continue doing it from there. I'm looking forward to it!

So for now I'm back in London, getting back to the swing of things in the UK. I'm actually very excited to get back to full-time working. The freelancing was cool, but I think in the end I realized I really prefer a full-time regular job.

Pretty Blonde Spies

Today I attended my first midday briefing press conference at the European Commission. I had watched some of them on the live satellite feed before, but never had the opportunity to attend one in person. I've actually been to a lot of events and meetings in the European Quarter this week, and the coolest part is how each of the chambers is so high tech (like the hemicycle of the European Parliament building, pictured right). In the Commission's press briefing room for example, each seat has headsets for listening to the translators, who all have separate booths lining the outside of the room. Each seat also has a microphone which you can use to ask a question to the spokesperson, and when its your turn your seat lights up. The future is here!

The subject which took up the most time at today's briefing was particularly relevant for me. Yesterday the EC circulated a memo to staff telling them to beware of spies seeking to infiltrate the European Commission, which is the EU's executive branch. The note warned to be wary of non-EU nationals, and reminded them that spies could come in any form, even a "pretty trainee with long legs and blonde hair."

Despite the memo writer's obvious talent for amusing self-parody, what has caused some controversy is that it mentioned journalists in the list of people to be wary of; a list that also included lobbyists, IT experts and private agencies. At today's press conference, a reporter named Lorenzo who represents the International Press Association voiced the association's displeasure that journalists, who have a mandate to discover hidden information, would be included on this list. He demanded to know why the EC was telling their staff to be wary of journalists because they were seeking information.

The spokesman and the reporter seemed to have a good relationship so it wasn't a tense exchange, but it was clear the reporter was not happy about the memo. The commissioner insisted that the memo wasn't criticizing journalists for seeking information, but rather EC workers for possibly giving out classified information too freely. He then pointed out that recently the current commission relaxed decades-old limitations on who in the EC could speak with the media. Apparently before these rules were relaxed only official spokespeople of the EC could speak with members of the media. The spokesman said this was unprecedented for most national parliaments, but I know that's not the case in Washington or London (any member of congress or parliament can speak with the media whenever they like) so I think that was a bit of hyperbole on his part.

He also mentioned that the EC's accreditation process was one of the most liberal in the world and does not involve security checks. So far this hasn't been my experience, as I am in the process of trying to get accredited and am finding it quite difficult. I have to first become a member of a journalists' union, so I just hastily applied for membership in the NUJ, which comes with a cost of 15 pounds a month. Then I have to show that I have been a working journalist, with pay stubs and published articles, for the past two years. Then I also need to bring letters of reference from employers. Getting my press accreditation in Washington did involve a quick security check, but it was far less cumbersome than this process in whole.

So it was an interesting first day. The midday briefings take place just down the street from my French course and happen just after my class ends, so I'm going to try to pop in at least three times a week to see if anything interesting comes up. Who knows, maybe I'll even ask a question one of these days. It will be worth it just to be able to use that little microphone!

Moving to Brussels

Well this is it, I'm finally doing it. In four days I'll be moving on from Zurich and hopping a train up to Brussels, trying to make it as an EU journalist. I'll still be doing my work-at-home job in the mornings, but now in the afternoons I'll be able to go to events, press conferences and interviews for freelance articles.

For the past few months I've been writing freelance articles on EU politics for a few different publications, but I've found I could only do so much while not being in Brussels itself (I can only write so many articles on Switzerland joining the Schengen Zone and Obama's relations with Europe!). I'm in the process of getting credentialed for the press centre, so it's all very exciting. I'll be continuing to work on my French at the same time with another course three days a week.

Of course my long-term goal is to find a full-time job in Brussels covering the EU, but I know it's going to be a challenge, especially in this job market. Careers in Europe tend to be very stratified into tracks, and journalism is no exception. From what I've seen most of the young EU reporters in Brussels writing for policy-focused publications all started as interns for MEPs or for the Commission, and most of them tend to have the same kind of background. Of course, I've never worked for the EU in any capacity, and I haven't been on a track for working within the EU like they have. My knowledge of the EU comes from my education, but not from being part of it. So I've got work to do in expanding my list of contacts, but I'm ready to dive into it. My general experience with government has always been from the outside looking in, having covered the US government, Chicago politicians, and European regulatory bodies. Being an outsider can make generating contacts a challenge. But I've been thrown into strange reporting beats before and picked them up quickly, so I'm pretty confident I can do it again here.

I'll be very interested to see what living in Brussels is like. I've heard...well...mixed reviews! I've been there many times, but never lived there. I think I'm going to love it, but I'm a peculiar breed I suppose. I've taken a room in an apartment I'll be sharing with a girl from Iceland, she works in Brussels in food lobbying. My Brussels life is already so international!

Moving to Paris

Now that I definitively have my Italian citizenship, it’s come time to enter the next phase of my life. What that is I’m not quite sure yet, but in the medium term I’ve decided that it involves moving on from my current job and heading over to the continent. I’ve been writing for my current publisher for two and a half years now, and although I’ve learned a lot and been afforded some great opportunities through it, the time has come to segue over to a different area of reporting.

I took this job, reporting for a monthly business publication and web site, when my assignment as a Washington political correspondent ended back in 2005. At the time, I was finding that my relative lack of business and economic knowledge was often a hindrance in my political reporting, and I was thinking about ways to fix that problem. Journalists, who are notorious for being more left-brained, have often been criticized in the US for their lack of business knowledge (though I’ve found that to be less the case in the UK). So I decided to seek out a financial reporting job in New York City to get up to speed. I was also eager at the time to return to the area I’m from, and the most plentiful reporting jobs in New York are in finance. I received a few offers but went for a position covering private equity investment, something I knew basically nothing about before I started writing on it. Since then I’ve covered buyouts in the US, venture capital investment in intellectual property in Europe, and private equity real estate investment in Asia. So luckily I’ve had the opportunity to get quite a diverse array of financial reporting experience under my belt, even if it was all private equity and venture capital related.

Hong Kong

I'm back in London now and slowly getting over my jet lag. Overall my Hong Kong trip went very well, both for my work activities and for my leisure time.

Though I was nervous about it, my on-stage interviews at that conference went fine. I was fortunate enough to have a fairly engaging and outspoken guy as my interviewee, so he was able to keep the conversation lively and engaging. The panel I moderated about frontier markets also went well, though it was hard to link the disparate geographic regions we were discussing into larger themes. But I got good feedback from the audience afterwards.

Brussels: first impressions

This weekend my friend Lori and I took a pleasant little mini-trip to Belgium. It was, believe it or not, my first visit to Brussels. Beyond being a little getaway, it was also a chance for me to check out the city and see if I could imagine myself living there.

If you're a regular reader of this blog you of course know that I have a keen interest in European politics, particularly those of the European Union. And given that I'm a journalist, I would very much like to translate this interest into a career. At the moment here in London I'm actually covering real estate investment in Asia, which is about as far away from European politics as you can get. But I'm currently in the process of getting Italian citizenship (through my grandparents), which would give me an EU passport and enable me to work anywhere in the EU. When and if that comes through, it will be time to evaluate my career options. Given that I have a big interest in the EU and am knowledgeable about the subject given my educational background, covering it seems a natural choice.

Of course such a transition would require a move to Brussels. So I figured it would be a good idea to check the city out to see if I could do it. We even got a hotel in the European Quarter to get the full experience.

Driving the English countryside

I went to a conference up in Oxfordshire yesterday. It was at this hotel in the middle of nowhere, literally in the middle of these vast green fields out in the country. The setting was quite pleasant but unfortunately it meant I had to rent a car and drive there, which was a little scary! You know, because they drive on the wrong side of the road here.

It was actually relatively easy to do it in the city and on the highway. After all, you just follow the car in front of you. But once I got off the country and started driving down all the country roads, it got considerably more challenging. I actually started driving down the wrong side of the road twice, and the second time was kind of a close call! I was driving on the right on this country road for a good two minutes when I saw a car about 40 feet ahead of me coming head on. Oh, riiiiight. Had I been taking a sharp turn, I’d be writing blog entries from the grave right about now.

The conference was good, I actually quite enjoy them now that I don’t feel like a fraud anymore. Before, when I was covering private equity and had to go to conferences in the US, I felt like a big fake because I didn’t know what I was talking about. When chatting people up at events I had two options, nod and smile and pretend to know what they were saying, or admit I didn’t know basic things and have to ask dumb questions, and having them wonder why they should read our publication if the journalists don’t even know what they’re talking about. I usually chose the former.

London

Hello from sunny London, England. It's been fun so far, but I haven't been working so it's been pretty laid back. I shouldn't have done an overnight flight Thursday, I really need to stop booking those. I can't sleep on planes so I feel like I've spent the last three days just trying to catch up on sleep, sneaking naps in wherever I can.

I went to watch my brother's rugby game on Saturday morning, that is some weird shit. I had no idea what was going on! They do all this crazy stuff like lifting each other up and locking arms and charging into one another. And when a player gets tackled, everyone just comes over and starts kicking him in the face, while he covers his head and braces himself. And all without any gear or protection. It's downright barbaric.

I haven't really done any touristy stuff, I feel like I've already done most of it, and since I just got back from Switzerland I'm kind of touristed-out. Tomorrow I start at the London office. I'm curious to see what it's like. I've heard some not-so-glowing reviews from people in the New York office.

I stayed with my friend Josh, who moved here a year ago, last night. He's doing well, finishing school soon and thinks he will stay here.

Right now I'm exhausted, I'm just staying in my hotel on Hoxton Square and watching some Sky TV. I'm a little nervous about going to the office tomorrow, I hate meeting lots of new people all at once. Ah well, I can suck it up. But I think I'm going to sleep now. Cheers!

London calling

So my boss pulls me aside yesterday to tell me I should go to London next week for a conference and to meet with some IP folks. I'm certainly not complaining, but it's really short notice! I'm scrambling to make reservations and schedule some meetings. I'm actually going to fly over there this Thursday because my brother is actually going to be in London this weekend for a rugby game, so that way I'll be able to see his game on Friday. Should be fun. I'm staying with Aaron over the weekend and then staying in a business hotel in the city during the week next week. I figured it would be bad form to stay in a hotel over the weekend and expect my company to pay for it when I'm obviously not working. So I figure I'll pay everything till Sunday myself and then get comped for everything after that.

This will be a good opportunity to see if I really want to go ahead with this move. The last time I was in London was over a year ago so it will be helpful to have some fresh experience there. It will also be helpful to see what it's like to be in the London office (I'll have a desk and everything while I'm there) and see how I like the people there. I know I've heard that the London office has a very different vibe from the New York office. This office is very laid back and everyone's fairly pleasant. We'll see how the other one is.

So by the time I get back I should have a definite idea of whether I'm going ahead with this or not. Right now my biggest concern is over money.

Switzerland

I gotta say it is really amazing to be here. I just got in from swimming in Lake Zurich, my dad has a little beach area out there with a table and some chairs. The water is incredibly clean, you can see right to the bottom, it's like swimming in the Caribbean. There's virtually no pollution here. I was just swimming in the water and a swan literally came right up to me. It was a little freaky! I got a picture of it though...

I've been keeping busy. Yesterday I went to the art museum, which was pretty cool. There was this amazing exhibit that I just sat and watched for 20 minutes. Can't even describe it to do it justice.

Today I met with a guy at the IP office at a Zurich university, mixing a little business with pleasure. I figured it would look good to my bosses if I made the effort to meet with some IP people here to prepare for covering European IP from London. It was a good talk actually, I learned a lot and the guy was very helpful.

Moving to Switzerland?

It’s been quite some time since I’ve written. The reason is I’ve been incredibly busy at work, which certainly isn’t a bad thing. It tends to be feast or famine here, the feast (of work, or famine of free time, depending on how you look at it) comes around deadline time, and then after deadline passes it relaxes again. That sounded remarkably gastrointestinal.

Interesting side note, my friend Alison just got hired as a new reporter here. I’m officially recruiting people for my publication. Go me.

In other interesting news, my family is moving to Switzerland. Strange eh? Not my entire family to be precise. My father and 16-year-old brother are moving there. My parents are divorced and my mom lives in Connecticut with her husband.

The city they're moving to is Zurich, Switzerland's largest city in the Northwest of the country near the border with Germany. I actually just wrote an article last month about how the city was just named the best in the world for quality of life (Geneva was second). My dad was going to have to move to Zurich eventually, he works for a Swiss company in an executive position and has moved up over the years to the point where he should really be operating out of the company’s headquarters in Zurich. But, he had convinced them to allow him to work out of his Connecticut office until my brother, who lives with my dad, graduated high school. About a month ago they changed their mind, and said he had to come to Zurich. So they’re going to do it.