Protests at the Commission

Carl spent a good part of this past week at the European Commission, working an exhibit booth for his employer at the "Green Week" event. It was a good experience for him as he got to meet a number of interesting people, but there was some unanticipated excitement when on Wednesday a protest outside the Commission building (a number of European fishermen were protesting high fuel prices that threaten to put many of them out of business) turned a bit violent. You may have even seen news coverage of the protests - I'm not sure if it was mentioned in the US or not, but our CNN International edition here covered it quite a bit.

He and the other event attendees were safe inside so there was never any danger, but as you can see from the photos he was very close to the "action" and could see everything. Fortunately he arrived before the bulk of the protests began and didn't need to leave until after things calmed down. Even if he had been planning to leave he couldn't have, because they had the building secured and the transit routes in and out of the area were shut down completely! Brussels definitely has its share of demonstrations; we're on the US Embassy's e-mail list so we get a message from them alerting us whenever a protest is planned, and there's usually one every week or so, particularly now that we're getting into the Summer months. We usually steer clear of them for safety reasons, so this was something unusual that we thought we'd share with you. Democracy at work!

Sidenote: the first picture is of Carl and his boss at their Green Week booth. Also, the banner being held up in one of the pictures translates to: "0.40 at the pump and nothing else" - referring to the maximum price the fishermen are willing to pay