Around the world, EU style

Earlier this month (after my first set of embassy open houses), I visited a bunch of European Union embassies as part of their EU celebration.

Emily and I spent the day walking up Massachusetts Avenue and stopping at the embassies that didn't have lines two blocks long. Our travels took us to:

Cyprus
We had some cheese and learned a bit about the Turkish occupation in the northern part of the country. We also decided we wouldn't mind taking a trip there.

The Netherlands
The embassy was in a beautiful old building filled with lots of Dutch art. We learned that the Dutch are the tallest people in Europe. They gave us waffle cookies with caramel filling — yum!

Slovenia
This is a modern building on a street of gorgeous old homes, so it looks a bit out of place. But when we walked in the ambassador was speaking about Slovenia. When he was done, they had everyone there gather around him for a picture, so I'm in a picture with the Slovenian ambassador (Roman Kirn). They also had sausage and honey cookies and tea with honey for us to taste. (Apparently the country is big on beekeeping.) And some fitness games where we won lip balm.

Denmark
We skipped Italy due to it's ridiculously long line and visited Denmark instead. They had everything set up outdoors in the courtyard. No free food here, but we did learn some Denmark facts. Did you know Greenland is part of Denmark? Or, in the words of Wikipedia, it's "an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark."

Finland
We skipped another long line at the U.K. and went to Finland, a modern, LEED-certified building. They had the best spread of food with spinach pancakes, fish spread, another fish dish, a coffee cake-type thing and cookies. They also had a musician playing and singing while we were there, and we heard the Finnish ambassador speak.

Belgium
The building wasn't too impressive, and this place was really crowded. However, we got beer samples, juice samples, chocolate, waffle cookies and pens. Plus, we saw some handmade lace-making, which was amazing. The ladies had about 50 bobbins of thread and 100 pins all to make one strip of lace. I have no clue how they knew where to place the pins and which bobbins to cross and weave.