The blessings of inter-state duty-free shopping

On my way home for Christmas I felt like doing my old man a favour and by him a bottle of Chivas Regal, his favourit whisky. In the airport shop the whisky shelf is filled with tempting goods, but no Chivas. I lift my head to see if there's more whisky to be found and in a distance, at the very far end of the liquor store at Brussels National Airport, hanging from the celing there's a sign with a Norwegian flag and a message stating, in Norwegian, that those flying to Norway still can enjoy duty-free shopping. Embarressed and with my head down in shame I walked over, picked up my father's whisky and got in line.
We're part of Schengen and we're part of the EU Inner Market, but we still have our own shelves at the airports equipped with big signs and arrows pointing us in the right direction.

Reflections on extra-brugoise vacation

I'm FREE! Finally FREE! The last exam is over, it's holiday and I feel soo... ...empty? I've got two weeks away from Bruges infront of me, two weeks without articles to read, papers to write, presentations to prepare and notes to revise. I've got two weeks with friends and family awaiting and yet there's a certain emptyness. Two weeks of holiday is also two weeks away from the people I've learned to know as friends over the last moths. It's two weeks without communal breakfast, lunch and dinner. Two weeks without coffee&cigarette breaks in the courtyard. Two weeks without nerdy Community-jokes, late night drinks at 't Potersgat, Bruges Zot, good and warm hugs from cute College-girls, linguistic schzophrenia and long days in the library. Luckily it's only two weeks. Come Monday 5 and everything will be back to normal. How I can't wait for that day to come!

Pre-holiday stress syndrome

It is (fairly) early in the morning of December 18th and in five hours I'll be outside some naked classroom waiting for the professor to invite me in for my final exam. With institutional community law, EU politics and policy and EU political economy off the way the only thing that separates me from two weeks of vacation is a 25m chat about how a/the european identity has been born, baptised and shaped throughout the last 7-800 years. Well, a short-version of the class is Europe from Plato to NATO so I'll probably have to say a word or two about Athens and Rome and how the Holy Roman Empire (which, according to Voltaire, was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire) was a continuation of the Roman Empire, and then a phrase or two about Westphalia and the creation of the modern nation state.

The pre-holiday stress syndrome isn't caused by my fear for the exam. I know my stuff, it's general knowledge and then some. What stresses me is the hours I have to kill before the exam. What to do? What to do?

Me vs. Insomnia

It's 05.43 and I've been up for an hour and awake for some more. I fell asleep probably about half-an-hour after midnight and found myself wide awake at 03.30. What to do? What to do? I've got nothing to read (except my economics syllabus). Had I had a place of my own instead of a single room in a student residence I could have made myself coffee, watched some CNN and been properly productive, but here, as I care about my neighbourghs, I'm confined to my 10m2 room with no water boiler, no TV, no nothing. An hour and fourty minutes from now I can get breakfast, but until then it'll be just me, my computer and Sir Humphrey Appleby, I'm afraid.