Brussels: The enlargement of the European Union was celebrated in Brussels with a street fair that attracted an estimated 80,000 visitors.
The Euro-quarter of Brussels, normally noted for its brutalist architecture and breath-choking traffic-jams, became a pedestrian and citizen-friendly zone for the day, bathed in sunshine and europhoria.
Musicians, dancers and artists from the new EU states vied for the attention of passers-by with displays of ethnic folk culture. The sounds of Hungarian folk-songs gave way to the noise of Slavic bagpipes. Their audiences were thoroughly international - a mix of Belgian residents, Eurocrats and even Japanese tourists. There were no formalities to compete with events in Dublin, although in mid-afternoon a team of athletes arrived, having run from Budapest carrying the flags of the 10 new states.
Not everyone was content just to stroll in the streets and parks and sought out worthier fare. The European Parliament and the Council of Ministers had both put on open days and both were rewarded with lengthy queues of would-be visitors who waited patiently to shuffle through the obligatory security checks.
Officials at the Council of Ministers said that whereas an open day last year had attracted 3,000 visitors, this time the numbers exceeded 5,000. The numbers visiting the parliament were estimated at more than 20,000.
The European Commission, often branded the least democratic of the three institutions, proved correspondingly less popular, although it still attracted a steady stream of visitors.
Inside the institutions, there were film displays, lectures, debates and piles and piles of brochures, leavened by the occasional promotional T-shirt or carrier bag. In the Council of Ministers, the Irish presidency's stand offered free baseball caps and umbrellas. The visitors showed no discrimination, hoovering up promotional gifts as if determined to get something back for their taxes.
"We ran out of umbrellas within the first two hours," said an Irish government official, apparently taken aback by the degree of public interest.
Yet more propaganda was available in the streets where there were dozens of stalls and displays.
The Fáilte Ireland stand struggled to compete next to a stall offering Lithuanian liqueur.
The organisers had arranged for 25 hot-air balloons to set off from an adjoining park. Although the balloons were inflated the wind direction meant they were not permitted to take off.
Fortunately most of the crowd was in too forgiving a mood to ask whether an excess of hot air going nowhere was an appropriate metaphor for EU expansion.