Trip to Brussels I

I am studying the Master's degree in International and European Relations.

What is the first thing you associate with this masters? I may not be right but normally, when we talk about International Relations we tend to think about Institutions. For example, we all think about the European Union or the United Nations, or the embassies and consulates. Sometimes we even think about the major "IR" cities such as Strasbourg or Brussels. Yes, Brussels.

As International Relations students, we should have a compulsory visit to different institutions, either in Brussels or anywhere else in the world. In fact, our University of Linköping gives us the chance to go on a trip to Brussels with the condition of visiting different institutions, finding all these visits on our own and organizing the trip in general (flights, accommodation, food... ) on our own. And of course, that's what we did.

Most of the classmates were willing to go so we met up and divided our tasks in order to organize the trip. Some of the classmates were responsible of finding th best flights to Brussels, some others were trying to find and contact institutions to organize our visits throughout the week and I was the one who had to find accommodation. This last one was paid by our University in Linköping.

It was quite hard to find appartments to host 24 people, however, we could find a perfectly located flats near the city centre. There were 3 flats hosting 7 people in two of them and another flat to host other 10 people. We divided the people based on their intentions during the stay (people who wanted to party, wanted to be quiet and the medium room). We got these appartments for the price of 3. 700€, from which 3. 400€ was paid by University. Te rest was paid by all of us.

We could find the most appropriate flights to get to Brussels. We flew from Skavsta Airport in Nyköping (1h30min from Linköping) to Brussels Charleroi Airport, which is in the south from Brussels (1h away from the city). We decided to spend an entire week there, from Sunday to Sunday.

But the principle purpose of the visit, to go to institutions was the mosT exciting part of all the organization. Five people worked on getting meetings or visits from when there. They did a great job and we could visit many places. These were the Swedish Consulate in Brussels, the Europen Comission, European Parliament, European Council, the European Union External Action (EEAS), The Russian mission to the European Union, the permanent Mission of the US, Committee of Regions, the International Labour Office the UN regional information centre and the Turkish mission to the EU (which I couldn't attend).

In the second post, I will talk about each of the institutions for you to discover more about these institutions.

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