Kitzka_MC: Around Europe in a Half Day: EU embassy open house.

Dining room in UK ambassader's residence.

Continuing from the last week, we went to DC for embassy open houses. This time, Europe. The countries in Europe had the open houses this week, while the rest of the world had it last week.

We were so impressed by last week's experience, we decided to make my older daughter skip school and take with us. So, it was a whole family affair this weekend.

The first stop was Great Britain. Man, compare to the other embassies, it's huge! Well, actually, the embassy itself is not that big (still pretty big.) but the estate has both embassy and the ambassader's residence, and the residence is larger than the embassy, complete with English (?) garden. Just look at this picture.

Apparently, this was the first time this residence was opened up to the public. It was impressive. Here's more from the place.

They had Shakespeare playing in the back porch.

BTW, the embassy home page said that they would have whisky waiting for us. I didn't see it. Maybe it was in the front yard somewhere...

Next stop was Denmark. A lady in a patriotic poncho lured us in with cookies.

The embassy is in a great location. It is close enough but somewhat off the embassy row. Nice and secluded. My wife said that stereo typical image of Danish was true. I agree! They were just modest and over all extremely nice people. It was warm and inviting like their famous furniture. No pretention, I mean, even the ambassador greeted us! He was actually out and about walking among us.

The man in the center is ambassador Peter Taksøe-Jensen

The front entrance to the ambassador's residence. Full of natural sunlight.

The queen.

They were pretty proud of their environmental consciousness. They said that garbage recycle rate over there is 90%. I am not quite sure if I heard it right. That is unbelievable. 36% of people in Copenhagen commute with bicycle. They even had bicycle track in the front yard to show us how much they like bicycle. My kids are just learning to bike, so they enjoyed it. They also enjoyed Lego.

BTW, down the street was an Italian embassy. Long, long line in front of it. People were lining up for two hours. Maybe they had good food. We did not stopped by.

Italian embasy

Also not stopped by was Belgian embassy. This was a bummer. We were looking forward to it, but it was already getting late and we were afraid we may not have a bus back to the Dupont circle if we get in the line. Why we were looking forward to the Belgium? Well, I knew they had Beer, waffle, chocolate... need I say more?

Belgian embassy.

So we decided to go walk down the Massachusetts Avenue embassy row. For those of you who are not familier, the embassy in Washington DC are clustered together in particular neighborhood, most of them on Massachusetts Avenue. On this street, it is pretty much every other houses and buildings are some diplomatic function. It is really something to see. Anyway, so we strolled down the street and just walked in to small embassies (many of them look like a town house from outside.) from small countries. We chose those small countries because there were no lines outside. Here are some.

We went to Latvia,