notes from natolin

"When I entered the Austrian Ministry for Foreign Affairs on 1 March 1973, my first boss installed me in an empty office and handed me a thick file which he advised me to study diligently and carefully. It was entitled 'Runderlass über die Formen der schriftlichen Aktenerledigung' ('Circular Instruction ad omnia on the Appropriate Forms of Written Communications'). Having come to diplomacy with a doctorate in history and having gone through years of archival research in preparation for my dissertation on Klemens von Metternich, I discovered very quickly that there was nothing in this 'Runderlass' which was in any way new or surprising. On the contrary, all the various elements contained therein, from the proper way of drafting the 'Aktenvermerk', (...) to the political report, the political instruction or the correct filing, were deeply familiar to me.

They were the same used by Metternich and his staff as he drafted and negotiated his European-wide diplomatic network."

-Eva Nowotny, 'Diplomats. Symbols of Sovereignty become Managers of Interdependence: The Transformation of the Austrian Diplomatic Service', in: Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka & Michael Gehler (eds.), Austrian Foreign Policy in Historical Context. (= Contemporary Austrian Studies, Vol. 14). Transaction, New Brunswick/London, 2005, pp. 25-38, p. 26f.

....yes, it's been a while. only this time i have a decent excuse for not updating my blog, since it wasn't due to the awful workload here at the college, but some nice travelling instead. the two majors governance in the eu and eu as a world actor (the latter being mine) went on a one-week "study trip" to brugge and brussels, leaving the number one of all european bootcamps for a couple of days and having a well-deserved break from all this paper madness.

on march 31, we went to brugge to visit our sister campus there, or as some might call it, the "real" college (we obviously don't share this opinion). it definitely is a nice city, marvelous buildings and small streets, since literally the town stopped developping in the 15th century. this makes for an incredibly beautiful environment, but also has serious drawbacks when it comes to nightlife or general city life: the college being the only university there, plus the city being relatively small, this doesn't allow for much extracurricular activities besides the self-organised ones. however, the college brings some life into this "gothic themepark" (as one of our guides called it), rewarded with the europe anthem, beethoven's ode to joy, being played every day by the mechanical clocks of the tower. during our stay, it was benelux+switzerland national day, and we had a really cool party in a place that fitted college requirements very well (cheap beer, odd music, nice atmosphere). besides, we discovered the brugge campus bar and perhaps one of the most bizarre nightclubs i ever saw, underwhere, which not only has credentials for the poorest pun ever, but also for basically being the only place open in brugge after 2 a.m. i was hosted by my austrian colleague kari, whom i already got to know last summer, and can only be described as one of the coolest guys between wien-neubau and brugge....all in all, it was a truly lovely weekend in brugge.

....sunday afternoon, we went to brussels, and if you already wondered what the "study" in "study trip" means if we're all partying all the time, here the more serious part started: during this week, we had an official college activity scheduled nearly all the time, the highlights being a lunch in NATO headquarters canteen (plus a very interesting presentation by jamie shea, spokesperson during the intervention in kosovo); a visit to the stability pact for south eastern europe, where the head of erhard busek's cabinet also answered all our questions patiently and comprehensively; a trip to the austrian permanent representation to the eu with insights on presidency matters; and some other interesting lectures on energy security, different external relations policy areas and the like.

in addition, i discovered that brussels is not the completely ugly town as i remembered it from my 1999 interrail visit, but that there are also some very nice corners too. chema and me did a museums afternoon, spending hours in the musée royale, recommendable not only because of an incredibly huge selection of flemish classics and its soon opening magritte-wing, but also for the coolest elevator i ever saw; of course, we toured à la mort subite, delirium tremens and some other famous beer places (12 percent alcohol beer is really not my cup of tea, to use an outspokenly uneven metaphor here), and, one of the real highlights: decent falafel. since in poland it's incredibly hard to get good foreign food, and our hotel was quite ok but its dinner just terrible, i ended up having falafel nearly everyday - what a welcome change to campus canteen and odd hotel food!

while most of the others went home on friday, i used the (relative) geographical proximity and the opportunity of a return flight ticket paid for by the college to visit my brother andi in groningen. now i already visited the city before and knew that it's not much of a tourist destination, but it was really cool to see my brother again, and enjoy the nice student's atmosphere there. above all, we had an incredibly nice austrian day, with cooking palatschinken ourselves and ending up with wieselburger, blauer portugieser from the winzer krems and bailoni schnaps, courtesy of wagram-based christoph who also lives in andi's students residence. we had a very nice time, and unfortunately i had to leave for warsaw again way too early monday morning....

some pictures are available in the photo album to the right....

....yeah yeah hair yeah.

-the robocop kraus.

rock

roll

....i just sent off my paper for inotai's course on the eu and the world economy, on which i worked all night through now. hell, i need some sleep.

....unfortunately i couldn't see it, but austria wien once again proved that, in reality, there is only one football club in vienna. for all my friends on the dark side of the force: 3:0!!!

....finally, after having missed them twice in vienna (once in 2003, once again during the last christmas holidays when i left for warsaw one day too early), i will see the white birch live!!! they'll play a concert in brussels on april 7, the week when we are going there for a study trip. come up for air!

....in a good austrian tradition i will start this brief overview with some remarks on the climate (what's good for robert musil's the man without qualities should only do it for this blog as well): the weather in warsaw is tricky. this winter was/is extremely cold, but during the last weeks there were signs that the situation might actually improve. but just when you have one nice day with sunshine and slightly higher temperatures, thinking that perhaps finally spring might arrive, the next day it's inhumanly cold again and the snow resumes falling endlessly from grey skies. if it was just for the cold, i could somehow manage - but that it has to be so wickedly grey all the time is slightly depressing. however, it was funny to witness the massive efforts by the administration to transport the snow (in the best of times approx. 50 cm) from the college's frontyard to the back, in an attempt to prevent the future melting process of the snow to turn the parking lots and pathways into a swamp. i really don't remember anymore how life actually is like without constant snowfalls and temperatures below zero....

anyway. the last weeks were relatively turbulent in almost every aspect. visits, national days, olympic games and the subsequent ping pong craze, job applications and not the least the college's academic programme kept me pretty busy. study-wise, i was preoccupied with lectures on the european neigbourhood policy (quite ok, but unfortunately spoiled by a severe lack of time allocated to debate), a simulation game on international negotiations and diplomacy (ok, but in combination with the ENP course i ended up having class for 11 hours straight a day for two or three days), and an excellent seminar on the challenges of human rights protection in europe - where i did my first presentation in french since ages, which, surprisingly, worked out quite well. at the moment i am busy collecting and reading tons of stuff on eu-western balkans relations in general and the kosovo question in particular, which is the topic of my thesis and not fewer than three of my papers here. in addition, until the beginning of may there's a couple of other presentations and papers to prepare, so we really cannot complain about a lack of work to do.

and, since we are all studying pretty much the same thing here, nearly everybody's appyling for the same jobs at the moment, the two most prominent examples being the european commission's junior expert and traineeship programmes. it was really fun to see all of us filling out the same forms and having the same problem: when you are applying for something related with the european institutions, you always have to hand in a ridiculous amount of documents, basically a proof of everything you ever did in your life - and, of course, hardly anybody had all this stuff at hand here at the college, so we all called our parents to send some missing documents; and on february 10 and march 1 (the respective deadlines for the two programmes), everybody was carrying around a big, stuffed envelope and headed for the post office in tesco....

back to real life: there was also a nice series of events in- and outside the campus, lukrecija's and berta's birthdays to celebrate (once again, all the best!), with berta ending up being the carnival princess in the cologne-like "parade" organised on rosenmontag by alexandra and sylvia - all authentic with incredibly bizarre traditional carnival songs from cologne, massive distribution of kamellen and a büttenrede by simon. strange german customs found their way to the college....and a strange german band: on february 17 we went to see/hear stereo total and a completely insane polish support act here in warsaw, in what now is one of my favourite venues in warsaw, the dom qltury (a former dom kultury, house of culture of the communist regime, converted into an alternative concert hall/club: shabby, filled with smoke and strange people, intimate); now this is not necessarily the band i'd go to see in vienna, but in poland it was fun to see the crowd going nuts over their electropop chansons, and did i mention the support act yet? guys with a name so cheesy i won't write it down here, covering classics from bon jovi, depeche mode, black sabbath and the like with an electroclash attitude and explicitly pubertal new lyrics, with a singer that looked much like austrofred - the kind of ironic trash i sometimes like to hear....

and, of course, last friday saw the belgian national day, with yummee food, beer and chocolate all day long (fries, the strange but excellent vegetable-potatoe-mash thing of which i forgot the name, gaufres de liège and the like). gaëlle, laurence, samir and stijn made a huge effort and threw a nice party, thanks once again! free belgian beer rules....

also last weekend, maeve got a visit by her irish friend guinevere, who witnessed the belgian craze upon her arrival. on saturday, we gave her an unguided tour through the old town and the café kulturalna - where we really had a nice time, once again, despite a lame dj and a new policy of the café to collect entrance fees on weekend evenings.

all in all, the last weeks were pretty busy but also pretty cool....

final destination: brussels? an enthusiastic stijn caught me in the moment i closed my eyes. party of the belgian national day, friday, february 27, 2006, around midnight, petit kalergi, natolin.

yes, i can smile as well: massimo (partially hidden), panagiotis and me in on a retrouvé nemo 2 at the café kulturalna.

....with the eyes of the alpine countries on torino (here at the college one could well observe the common sense assumption that the rest of the world really doesn't care about winter sports at all, except perhaps for ice hockey and doping scandals involving coaches going completely mental), it was about time for the first college of europe olympic games in modern history.

the natolin olympic committee under the sound direction of marcel from moldova, aka jacques rogge-spatari, introduced a broad set of disciplines, including ping pong, chess, poker, dancing and "the game", as the natolian adaptation of a famous team quiz show from the soviet era is called. saturday, february 11, saw the official opening ceremony, with athletes from roughly 30 countries entering the arena under their country's flag and presenting themselves to a cheering audience. as the only austrian student here, it fell on me to bear the flag....

ok, let's not talk of the one-hour chaotic gathering of the flagbearers in the retinger side entrance room that actually preceded the ceremony and nearly led to some of us getting maimed or even worse (the flags provided by the college were the ones for the outdoor flagpoles, so they were really big and not easy to handle with 30 people standing in a room of perhaps 10 square meters), but instead focus on the outstanding athletic performances that were on display during the last weeks: tiziana's uncompromising drive for triple ping pong gold (female single, female double and mixed double), the stunning performance of berta and alfonso winning the dancing contest....

....and, of course, my incredibly poor performance at male single ping pong, where i did not win a single set. fortunately, my olympic career was saved by at least one game won with maeve in the mixed double (panagiotis and me played a stable group phase in the male double, but sadly this was not enough to win a game), and the glorious silver medal in "the game" with the "thank god we are not british"-team - asun, chema, eric, kathrin, maeve, yasmina and me....

post scriptum, 22.30: as panagiotis commented, i forgot to mention who actually won "the game": with panagiotis' global knowledge of every football game ever played in the history of time (who else might know which country has a team that once one the european cup but now only ranks on the 104. place in the fifa-statistics?) and marius' political skills (despite having three german native speakers in our team, we did not manage to recall angela merkel's husband), anna, tiziana, marius, massimo and panagiotis decided the game. however, without chema and the encyclopedias of history he apparently knows by heart, we wouldn't have had a chance anyway.

kreisky, schau owa! now who would have thought that i'll carry the austrian flag once? not me, at least. (partially hidden: jonida and skanderbeg's eagle on the albanian flag).

....it's been quite a while since my last entry, so i'll start the review of a series of fortunate events chronologically....

in mid-february, the one and only, legendary social working class hero, certified outdoor trainer, king of st.-paul-gasse, festival driver and probably austria wien's last real fan, peda, made his threat made during the christmas holidays at café ulrich in krems true and visited warsaw, accompanied by his girlfriend kerstin and guggi and raman. now if this doesn't deserve some extensive reporting....

friday, february 10, a group of college students including this blog's host went to hear/see a concert by susheela raman at fabryka trzciny, which was really cool. actually, since my days at glatt & verkehrt 2001, i haven't had seen a concert like this anymore, with neither turntables nor synthesizers - nor, on the other extreme, metal riffs and severe double bass drum action -, just an incredible voice and sophisticated basic instrumentation. thanks, sylvia, for convincing me to go there (despite the ticket prices that were unusually high for warsaw)!

anyway. after the concert a smaller group - maeve, lukrecija and sylvia - and me went to the café kulturalna in the palace of culture and science, where we met peda and kerstin for some beers. hell, it was good to see him again and joke in the rough, hermetic way we used to and for which austrian german is just the perfect language (of which i am deprived of here at the college, being the only austrian student). in addition, at midnight we started celebrating lukrecija's birthday and had a really good time....

the next day, maeve's parents arrived in warsaw as well. now meeting the parents of your girlfriend for the first time is definitely a weird experience, and especially so under the circumstances here at the college. fortunately, they turned out to be extraordinarily nice people, reminding me of my own parents in quite a lot of aspects. in the afternoon we gave them an unguided tour around the stare miasto district - the old town -, which is basically one of the few parts of this otherwise disturbingly ugly city that is really worth visiting (and which is really beautiful, but as stated before in this blog, has been completely rebuilt after 1945). after running around for a couple of hours, we found a nice "traditional" polish restaurant - well, as traditionally as it gets in a completely touristy district, had dinner and then headed back to the college, to participate in the opening of the first natolin olympic games in modern history (see the separate entry above).

after the opening ceremony, peda, kerstin, guggi and raman visited us on campus and we had some beers in my room, with various visiting drinkers from the natolin community. the evening lasted until 4 a.m., and was really cool. peda once again proved his unequalled status as a stirring story teller and philosopher ("austrian german is more like barking, you just puke out the words", when we tried to explain maeve the differences between austrian and standard german once again).

this may sound pathetic, but i feel really privileged to know a man as integer and unique as him....

two legendary 80s rock/metal band t-shirts, two 80s football player haircuts, two strange attempts of beards and two extraordinarily nice evenings in warsaw: peda and me at the café kulturalna.

....i have to admit, with no really pressing paper or presentation deadline on at the moment, i distracted myself a little bit from all these various commission application forms with a little bit of computer gaming, after about ten years of fasting....

somehow i discovered abandonia, which praises the old dos games i used to play when i was 14 - and, which is really cool, even with free, legal (!), full version downloads. after finding out that i still suck at ufo - enemy unknown, i turned to ascendancy, one of the most underrated games ever, and now i know again why i spent more time playing that then doing my homework in the mid-1990s. chamanchies rule!

anyway, panagiotis came up with the real thing: a full-fledged flash version of rick dangerous (even with original sound), which immediately brought me back to my amiga 500 childhood days....

....only 7,24 zloty for telephone and printing in january! i wish my natolin bills were that low every month....

....for february, this new award goes to....: the european agency for the management of operational cooperation at the external borders of the member states (aka frontex). congratulations!

many thanks to café babel and its natolin branch for making us aware of this new warsaw-based agency and the subsequent nice discussion and party evening....

....anna k. (last name to be pronounced as "kokakolalight") has left the college to secure peace and prosperity in europe through working for the finnish foreign ministry and its council presidency in the second half of 2006. all the best to you, anna, and i hope that we'll meet again, in warsaw, brussels, helsinki, vienna or whereever!

....last thursday, after hearing an interesting lecture by jean-luc dehaene on the eternal question of où va l'europe (which, these days, way too often is restricted to the future of the constitutional treaty), we went to the polish national opera to see swan lake. well, strange enough, i never have been to the ballet before. and it was also the first time i visited the warsaw opera - the building is quite charming and well worth seeing; the music and the orchestra's performance were really great, but the production was lame and really cheesy. but still, first time at the ballet rocks....

what the hell is evil jumpsuit guy doing on stage with that poor swan, why is the plot so strange and how on earth can human beings dance like this? lukrecija, pawel, edwin, chema, asun and half-me at the teatr wielki in warsaw, the polish national opera.

anyway. with warsaw in a constant state of two-digit minus degrees, it was time to get out of here for a couple of days. maeve and me chose paris because it is, well, paris - a beautiful city where you can easily get cheap flights to; in addition, maeve's friend charlotte said she could lend us her apartment for a couple of days. no wonder we didn't hesitate (thanks, once again!). so we found ourselves on board of an airbus a320 of what perhaps is europe's most bizarre airline, continued the travel experience with a one-hour bus ride from beauvais-tillé, perhaps europe's most bizarre airport, and finally arrived in paris friday evening.

the apartment was really cool, pretty central in the troisième arrondissement, nice neighbourhood, but this being paris, on the fifth floor without an elevator and a heating system that is not designed to bring you through cold winters (or to provide hot water for more than fifteen minutes a day). we had dinner with charlotte and her boyfriend nico in a very nice vegetarian restaurant in beaubourg and a couple of beers in saint-germain-des-prés....saturday we met my friend raphael, who worked with me at the osce last summer and now is back in paris. it was really cool seeing him again, and instead of going to the karat label night at the rex, we spent the evening in his apartment in montmartre and had a nice dinner (self-cooked! gosh, how i miss cooking here in warsaw) back at charlotte's place.

sunday we slept in - i really don't know how we managed that, since it was the chinese new year celebration all over the district and one could hear millions of firecrackers in beaubourg from the early morning; we walked around the city and spent a nice afternoon in belleville, with raphael, arnaud (another former osce-colleague of mine), their friends and charlotte. monday, we finally managed to visit the centre pompidou and subsequently i saw one of the best art exhibitions of my life, which had a stupid title ("big bang"), but featured an incredible amount of important contemporary artists, including some of my dearest heroes - notably the great and unequalled bruce nauman....

it was really cool to spend some days with maeve outside campus, we truly had a great time....and i really liked paris, which i did not remember being that cool a city after my short visit while on interrail in the summer of 1999. the weather was really good, after some weeks of minus degrees, a sky that only knows shades of grey and 40 centimetres of snow surrounding our students residence, 3 degrees plus and a little bit of sunshine felt like spring....it was unbelievably cool just walking through the city, have a coffee or a beer in a nice café....

maeve and me at a bridge over the seine....

notre dame and its new hunchback: church, strange guy's head

maeve on the island in the seine....

oh my gosh it's strange guy again

où va l'europe? the twelve stars waving over the samaritaine

this photo might need some explanation: i first saw french fries guy in budapest a couple of years ago, and i was stunned by his sheer out-of-this-world ugliness....whoever designed this must be completely insane, even more so the owners of snack shops all over europe who use this uniquely strange artifact to promote their fries....

es gibt nur cool und uncool und wie man sich fuehlt.

....hell, warsaw is cold. and, with cold, i mean really cold. siberia. spitzbergen. antarctic. the worst winter since a generation is haunting warsaw, and, of course, this has to happen in the very year i am here. you put things into a perspective when you come home from the movies and drinks on a saturday night at 1.00 a.m., have a look at the thermometer outside your residence and witness -22 degrees measured there. next weekend, temperatures are expected to drop to -30 at night. thank goodness, i'll be in paris by then (which, of course, these days is not tropical either, but it feels odd that, when the whole of europe is complaining about the severe winter, you're in the place where it is even worse)....

anyway. there's been so much going on during the last week, i haven't found the time to update my blog. for once, lectures have started again, and probably this is the most important difference separating the two semesters: whereas we had to sit in class for eight hours straight a day from monday to saturday last autumn, now we only have occasional classes, perhaps once, twice or three times a week - according to our chosen major subjects and the now individualized schedule - and there's only like three or four hours of courses each day. what an incredible relief, and it definitely makes college life much more "normal" than before.

secondly, our expectations were mostly surpassed when we finally received our first semester grades (unfortunately preceded and a little spoiled by a ridiculously intensive witch-hunt undertaken by the college to look for plagiarism in our papers), and it is good to learn that this whole surreal lifestyle of last november and december was not totally for nothing. i passed everything, my average is quite ok, or way better than expected, and it is good to have this burden off my shoulders and won't have to get back here in september to repeat one or more exams.

what else happened? on campus: we are finally receiving the kind of outside visitors, lectures and conferences one might expect in a place like this: last week's one-day conference on the countdown for bulgaria's and romania's eu membership with the ministers of european integration of these two countries (which was really disappointing, at least the part i attended); this week there's a state secretary from spain speaking on spain's foreign policy within the eu framework and jean-luc dehaene, former prime minister of belgium and very prominent and articulate member of the convention on the future of europe will hold a lecture on the prospects of the constitutional treaty; two of our professors on european security architecture will hold a special evening on cold war history; erhard busek, special co-ordinator of the stability pact for south eastern europe, will visit us in early february....

so far, the official stuff. and with the newly won semi-freedom of less classes and more spare-time, we are able to organize ourselves loads of trips around poland and europe, to the opera, the parliament, film evenings and the like. as i already mentioned, maeve and me are going to paris next week, sponsored by really cheap wizzair-tickets and a friend of maeve's, who is so kind to let us her apartment there for a couple of days, really looking forward to that....

well, the general atmosphere at the college is really great of the moment, and i really enjoy being here. of course, there's a lot of things to organize these days: our master theses, the history papers, the applications for traineeships and the junior expert-programme of the commission; but with the present moderate dosage of readings, i am still able to kill a lot of time with going for a beer, watching movies in vlodkovic and the like; and, once again, scrubs saved my life during the worst one-day cold ever inflicted on a human being in the history of time....

photographical evidence:

peasant life and an unsuccessful attempt to dress up as kraftwerk's mensch-maschine album cover: maeve and me at the russian orthodox "old" new year party in the campus bar.

ice age, sunday afternoon: sylvia, maeve, asun and me, trying to take a walk in the park (with -15 degrees outside). we gave up after 10 minutes....

....well, i'm back in natolin again. real life kicked in for almost three weeks in austria. life outside a campus. places where you meet old friends, go out, have decent food all day long, see unfamiliar faces in the streets and where you have to use trams, metro and trains on a frequent basis. hell, it was great.

especially after this exam craze in december, which really brought me close to the brink of complete physical exhaustion. my sleep deficit acquired back then made me hardly ever get up before 1.00 p.m. during the holidays, which actually sucks when you want to enjoy your recently won freedom and go out and meet loads of people, but i just couldn't do otherwise. i so desperately needed sleep. and rest.

and, of course, some club nights as well, although vienna was a little bit disappointing in that regard, with just the standard resident djs everywhere. so. what's left of christmas? seeing most of the people i wanted to see; blurred memories of the birthday parties of julia, florian and tuncay; new year's eve with a bourgeois raclette feast, dinner for one, a rocking bobo party at the outskirts of vienna and some nice drinking and dancing at wirr; sylvia's visit and the subsequent nights at slopes and in the laudongasse kitchen; getting drunk with schaua at 4.00 p.m.; my father's 50th birthday party; the farewell dinner with katrin, romana and julia; by chance meeting julia (carrying three dr. oetker pizza quattro formaggi) in the bus immediately after my arrival in vienna; spending some nice and quiet christmas days in traismauer; seeing my former room in laudongasse completely transformed; a melange and a mohr im hemd at café eiles; and tons of other things....unfortunately i didn't have the time to be everywhere i wanted to at the same time....

well, and there was snow. way too much. but this was just a minor hassle.

the kids are alright: schaua, flo, tuncay and me at florian and tuncay's birthday party.

vienna was cool. austria was cool. what was akward: being there and not really having a room or an apartment on my own anymore (although julia and tina did a great job of hosting me at the laudongasse premises), especially since i don't know whether i'll really come back to live there permanently for the years to come - since i can't tell what my life will look like then and if and what and where i'll start working after the college. it felt like a kind of transit, though everything was just too familiar. but this is just stupid mindgames. i like vienna. i like the people i know there. and i miss them.

nonetheless, it's grand to be back in our beloved golden cage-slash-eu boot camp. and i can't tell how much i missed maeve. feels good to finally listen again to old irish sagas and discover the truth about the sound of music. and seeing all the other people i missed in vienna, listening to their christmas stories....

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....find of the day: blogspirit provides its users with statistics on the number of unique visitors, pageviews, data transfers, and the like. in addition, i can also see from which sites or search engines visitors were referred to notes from natolin.

of course i am aware of the incredible importance of this very site for world politics and a peaceful and prosperous future of mankind as a whole - nonetheless, i have to admit that i was relatively surprised when i just saw that the number 1 referer to my blog apparently is http://www.iaea.org - the homepage of the international atomic energy agency.

i have severe doubts that the agency really linked to me, i assume that this is some kind of bad joke from an underworked geek at blogspirit....nonetheless, it's funny.

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