Sunday, October 5, 2008 in Leuven

This morning most of us got up and had breakfast in the hotel. (It comes with the room!) We all then met up with Christina (Brussels GMF Staff) to head out to Leuven.

We walked from the Hotel to the Brussels Central Train Station - a nice 115-20 minute march - i mean jaunt, to catch the train. Leuven was a short 30+ minute ride outside the city.

Leuven is a small University town that really typifies the Belgium experience. An interesting fact is that Dutch, French and German are the three primary languages here.

In Leuven at various times over the past century, and still today, this becomes an issue. The University is the longest - still operating Catholic university in the world. Classes were taught primarily in French until the 1960's when the Dutch population began demanding classes taught in their native tongue. At that time the University split - though it has now come back together into a single institution. In the 1960's the University in Leuven became Dutch speaking and a French campus opened elsewhere - now the two campuses are back to being a single institution with classes being offered in both languages.

We were very lucky to be joined in Leuven by Tress (GMF Staff) who gave us a guided tour of the City. Her parents are both art historians who attended University there in the 1960's and were two of the radicals who blocked the doors to the French speaking professors. They had provided her with several pages of notes regarding the art and the history of the campus.

Our speaker for the day was Koert Debeuf, a Belgian author and member of the Open VID (the Flemish Liberal party). He is a speech writer and spoke of various political issues, the banking crisis and the EU. However, what I found to be the most interesting were his thoughts on the difficulties of drafting speeches in at least two languages sometimes three or four. All of the speeches have to be in both French and Dutch, sometimes they also present in English and they may even sprinkle in a bit of German.

What was so interesting about this was the difficult transitioning from one language to another presents to the flow of the presentation and the political undercurrents of what is presented in which language. This impacts which newspapers and TV stations will cover what information. All quite fascinating.

Then a quick train ride back to Brussels for our dinner meetings with Nikolas Busse, NATO and EU Correspondent. I will let you know how that goes this evening!

The dinner was very interesting. We had several past European MMFs as well as some "friends of GMF". The discussion was lively and there seems to be a great deal of disagreement amongst Europeans regarding nearly everything! It was an interesting discussion from the fact that we were not even really in Brussels (Brussels is merely 1 of 19 municipalities that make up the metropolitan area which we generally think of as Brussels-that is where the EP is actually located - 1.5 blocks from the Hotel Leopold).

Nikolas's topic was titled "The European Union from a Journalist's Perspective" and I have to say, that this level of agreement pretty much sums it up.