Finding place

I am in Brussels. I am not full of muscles. If you are not from the land down under, you may not find that funny.

Anyway, I am in Brussels as a citizen journalist with the Maltese Presidency of EU. If you are from the land down under or indeed anywhere else in the world, several aspects of the previous sentence need explaining. Hence this blog. I already have one blog at footloosewithjo.blogspot.com but when I tried to go in from Brussels, I could read but not write. My trusty little machine kept informing me that I didn't have a blog and would I like to start one. So here it is.

This job and this blog are experiments. In both cases, I don't know what I'm doing. Last year, I responded to the ad because I liked the idea, I wanted to find out more about Malta in relation to EU and I figured a few weeks in Brussels would be interesting. Once I got into the selection process just before Christmas, I became more excited because it seemed that I was tapping into a collaborative way of working that is still rare in Malta, at least in relation to an outsider who can't speak Maltese. The applicants were invited to go along to a series of Futuring workshops run by an organisation called TimesUp, a European arts company who have just completed their project with the Maltese presidency by presenting an exhibition at Solipsis in Rabat in Malta. Way back before Christmas and before citizen journalists, I had registered for TimesUp Floriana workshop. It looked like the strands of my interests in Malta were starting to weave into a picture.

So, I got the job along with nine others, mostly young and recently out of college. The beurocratic business of signing contracts proceeded and I was happy to see that I would be working with TimesUp on gathering material to go up on a beehive at the entrance to Dar Malta in Brussels. Ten citizen journalists met with the artistic director and worked out when we would go to Brussels in groups of three. Time passed. The first group set off. I learned incidentally that TimesUp were no longer involved even though they continued with their Malta project. I continued to meet them from time to time at cultural events. I heard nothing from anyone else. I had imagined that we would all have access to the beehive so that we could build a sense of a developing project and spark off other citizen journalists' input. The hive was not accessible. I got in touch with the two others who would be in Brussels at the same time as me. We supported each other in our ignorance.

I arrived here last Friday, late in the evening, having booked an apartment for a week with the intention of finding something cheaper when I was here. That story is told on my FB page. The week has been exhausting as I started to learn about a fascinating new city, a political union across an entire continent and a job that appears to be non-existent except as an appearance of an idea. The citizen journalists have conducted interviews and these have been uploaded carefully but there is nothing beyond the mirror. Like the Maltese construction industry, there is nothing behind the heritage facade.

Which brings me again to this blog. This is my attempt to bring meaning into seven weeks in Brussels. Tomorrow I move to another apartment, not much cheaper than this one but in a more pleasant area. My colleague citizen journalists are coming to help me move and we will trundle my luggage, including the books I have already succumbed to, across Brussels. At the weekend, I will write the story of my first week as a citizen journalist in Brussels.