Walk Around the European Union with a Froggy Bonus

I did today's Volksmarch in D.C., which was organized in conjunction with the European Union open house. The event started at the Embassy of the EU Commission at M and 23rd and the route continued up Massachusetts Avenue )and several side streets) past several other embassies. This has always been one of my favorite parts of D.C. to walk around. The architecture is lovely and it's always fun to see how many of the embassies I can identify just from their flags. As for actually visiting the open houses, the lines at several of the embassies were too long for me to want to stop at them. I did go to some which had less intimidating crowds and discovered that the major feature on offer at many was food. The Danish embassy had butter cookies (which I ignored) and fresh strawberries. Belgium was the highlight as they were giving away Leonidas chocolates. By the way, the outside of the Belgian embassy also has a particularly great view of the National Cathedral. I had closer to a lunch snack at the Embassy of Finland. They had delicious mushroom pastry, lots of cheese and crackers, cured salmon with mustard sauce, and some sort of berry juice. Slovenia had a sort of sweet bread.

Given the crowds, I decided to forgo more embassy visits in favor of finally seeing the Frogs! exhibit at the National Geographic Museum (which is at 17th and M, so near the end of the route). It was worth a look. There were Vietnamese frogs that look like patches of moss, for example. The highlight was, of course, the poison dart frogs which are just beautiful, like living jewels.

All in all, it was a very pleasant day. I'm looking forward to doing the walk in two weeks that involves open houses at various other embassies. That walk focuses on South America, but there are also open houses at the embassies of Madagascar and Micronesia among others.