The poster in the Commission building said all you needed to know. "The UK Stagiaires' Austin Powers Party. Your Big Red Bus will pick you up outside The Hairy Canary on Saturday at 8 p.m." Partygoers were encouraged to dress appropriately and instructed to have lots of fun. I've no doubt they did.
Stagiaires, as interns are called in Brussels, spend much of their free time at events like this, taking home from their year abroad happy memories of drunken nights, one-night stands and brief romances. But in a city full of expatriates organised social life is a popular way to make friends of any age, particularly for those who are single.
The number of organisations is bewildering, from the English-speaking Gay Group ("Don't worry if you can't speak English - you'll be sure to meet someone who speaks your language.") to the Brussels International Christian Women's Club. Apart from such formal groups, networks of friends arrange regular parties and dinners, usually involving elaborate rules to ensure that guests talk to one another.
A few weeks ago a friend took me to one of these events, organised by what he referred to rather mysteriously as "the international group". Was it a religious cult? A revolutionary cell? No, he assured me, it was just a group of people from different European countries who liked to get together now and then. How lovely, I said.
We were told to prepare a main course for five of the 25 guests and to buy a present for one of the others, whose name was sent to us by e-mail. Eager to please and happy to cheat, I enlisted the help of a kind friend who prepared some delicious stuffed pork to take along.
We were half an -hour late but we were the first to arrive and found our hosts, a Finnish woman and her Spanish boyfriend, squabbling morosely in English. Ten minutes later, we received a dribble of wine in a plastic cup and were told that there was one more thing: we had to compose and recite a poem to go with our gifts.
Struggling with a limerick to someone I had never met, I watched the next few guests drifting in and considered all the other things I might be doing with these few hours of my life. I could be reading a book or watching television. I could be praying with the International Christian Women's Club.
Things picked up when an enterprising group of English guests assessed the wine situation and set out to buy more, ensuring a more generous flow for the rest of the evening. As we ploughed through one scarcely-edible dish after another (until my delicious pork arrived), the conversation started to flow too.
Almost every EU member-state seemed to be represented at the table and the professional mix was a good reflection of life around the European institutions. A few worked for the institutions themselves, there were a couple of journalists and the rest were lobbyists or consultants - the two fastest-growing professional groups in Brussels.
As usual in Brussels, everyone was thoroughly committed to the European project and everyone agreed that the media gave a distorted view of how the EU works.
(Oddly enough, this view is shared by most Brussels-based correspondents, a group that might be thought to share some responsibility for reporting the EU. When the Swedish trade minister met some European correspondents for dinner in Stockholm last week, he said he felt as if he was addressing a crowd of missionaries rather than a group of journalists.)
But what was most striking about the "international group" was that, despite their devotion to the European cause, they were more sharply conscious of national differences than any similar group elsewhere. The old jokes came tumbling out, about German humourlessness, French arrogance, English food . . . And everyone seemed determined to live up - or down - to their national stereotype.
For myself, it was not the most auspicious introduction to institutionalised social life in Brussels and I haven't seen any of the other guests since - not even the recipient of my limerick. But I'm not ready to give up just yet and I scan the bulletin boards daily for promising prospects.
Next week, for example, the Toastmasters' Club of Brussels meets at the Meridien Hotel for dinner and the notice is explicit and reassuring: "Guests are not expected to speak."
Now you're talking.
