From the EU to Colombia

No, unfortunately I'm not going on a trip to Latin-America, I'm only refering to the past weekend, but it was exciting enough as well.

Friday morning I had the pleasant foresight of a whole day of pre-selection exams for the EU institutions, better known as the 'concours européenne'. As it's the spring break right now my body was a bit resistant to getting up early that morning but I made it in time all the way up to the Wembley stadium in North-London.

I was expecting huge halls filled with thousands of tiny tables and an equal amount of pale candidates, like I was used to from the selections for the Belgian and Flemish civil service in the Heizel. The more because I read in the newspapers that some 41.000 people were doing that exam in the whole EU.

But I forgot this is the UK and it was an EU exam. Those two abbreviations don't go well together; it was quite pathetic. There were some 400 tiny tables provided (I estimate) but only about 25% of the registred candidates actually showed up to pass the exam. And a large share of them were French, German, I even met a Dutchman, pretty disappointing result for the whole UK.

The exam itself was tough. I had been informing myself a bit about it beforehand and so I knew the kind of general EU-knowledge and verbal and numerical reasoning questions they usually ask. A couple of hours on wikipedia and the EU website picking up some statistics and history on the EU prepared me for that. The main challenge was working against the time.
But then there were the specific questions for "administrators in the field of law". I had roughly been going through my course on European Law from 3 years ago in the days before the test but damn, I was by far not prepared for this!

It was all focussed on EU competition law and that was only briefly touched upon during my law studies (it was an optional course). The questions supposed that you knew a lot of the articles of the EU treaties and judgements of the European Court of Justice by heart, à la 'the Court of Justice judgement of 24 July 2003 in Case C-280/00, Altmark, cohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifncerns:'
or 'under article 216 EC a Member of the Commission can be compulsory retired on application by:' and then options a to d.

Okay, next time at least I know what to expect from that part.


Here's the Wembley stadium as a huge construction site. It's reopening is being postponed until 'sometime in 2007', due to problems with the roof.



After the exam I took the tube back to Oxford Circus where I was meeting Ruth my Spanish friend for dinner. We decided to go for some drinks in a nice wine bar in Soho and then we discovered a buffet-all-you-can-eat Thai for only £ 6.50! Unseen in London!!
Ruth is now among the top of the jetset crowd in London, that is to say she serves them... Having a law degree from Spain but still having some catching up to do on her proficiency in English, she's working in one of the top hotels of London for the moment. The likes of Claudia Schiffer, Pierce Brosnan and George Clooney are among her daily customers. Most of her colleages are non-EU citizens (Koreans, Latinos,...) going for the high wages in London or simply trying to improve their English.

So after the dinner we were going to hang out with her Colombian colleagues. One of them was throwing a house party in Bayswater, just next to über-posh Notting Hill. I now can officially testify that Colombians grow up with salsa in their legs and do not like jokes about drugs. For the record, it was told 'por un non-latino no bailas malo' and I didn't tell the jokes about the drugs ;-)