Aujourd’hui, as in the day we learned them.  Which was yesterday – or ‘hier’ if you want to be pedantic – seeing as I could only get wifi access this morning.

Anyway, enough already of all this confusing time delay blether.

What are the five random things we learned on our first day in Strasbourg?

1.  The national tree of the Czech Republic is the ‘lipa’.

Or lime tree.  We know this courtesy of the very bright and talented intern working in the EU office in Scotland who is Czech and speaks better English and French than we two.  To our shame.  And we also know this because Strasbourg has lots of  boulevards planted with these trees and they are all in blossom right now.  The scent is magnificent.

Jealous yet?  Good.

2.  The European Parliament Facebook page has over 160,000 followers.

We know this thanks to the Head of Social Media for the European Parliament  – get us huh?! – who kindly gave an hour of his time yesterday to explain how the Parliament is engaging with social media and reaching whole new audiences.  We thought 160,000 followers was pretty impressive …. but they can always use more!

3.  The Parly shop sells newspapers in six languages

We were disappointed it wasn’t more but the clinging to the established languages of the Parliament – French, German and English – continues.  The banks of interpreters and translators has to be seen to be truly appreciative of the scale of this enterprise.  Think about it.  It’s not just English into however many member state languages there are but also all those languages back into English.  Awesome.

Sad to say, you can buy the Daily Mail in Strasbourg.  And before you ask, no we didn’t.

4.  All votes are held in Strasbourg and not Brussels

(This random thing comes from Malc so if it’s wrong, it’s all his fault…)  EDIT – it WAS wrong, and it IS Malc’s fault!).

The European Parliament packs its bags and boxes and literally does transfer en masse to Strasbourg one week out of every four.  And even though it is only here a quarter of the time.  Its mental.

Listen up, MSPs and MPs.  Today’s plenaries start at 9am.  Sharp.  There is the required lunch break at 12 noon – au naturelment – but also committees, press conferences, visits, meetings, delegations etc.  Plenary session is back at 3pm and continues through until about 7pm.  When everyone breaks for receptions, bar chats, then dinner and more work chat.  It’s all pretty intense.

Did I say we were loving it?!

5.  The single communist Czech MEP was the first Czech in space.

If we had asked the lovely Czech intern the right question, we would be able to tell you his name.  And while we thought this was a random interesting thing, apparently he’s not the only kinda celeb MEP.   Rest assured, we are on the hunt for more…..

And some of you might be relieved to know that as well as learning random things, we are also finding out about interesting, important things, which we will of course, be blogging on in due course.

A bientot….