Five continents in one day: Part 1

Visiting the Washington DC embassies of Britain, Bolivia, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia

May 2024

I saw Hillary Clinton.

I’m not joking.

We were walking past her house. (We had no idea it was her house.) It was drizzling, but there were a few people standing around, looking at the double-storey, and there was a black bus with darkened windows parked on the road out front.

I slowed down. It was a long time ago, but I was a hard news reporter for many years. I can smell a story.

I was nonchalant. I looked up a side street. There was a woman there, watching me.

“What’s going on here?” I asked her.

“Hillary Clinton’s about to come out.”

“Oh,” I said. “How come?”

“That’s her house. She’s going out.”

Well.

Hillary and Bill Clinton!

Those two.

I suppose they have to live somewhere, don’t they? And we were just blocks from US Vice-President Kamala Harris’s house, and all the embassies down on Massachusetts Avenue.

So, sure.

I told the other members of my party what I’d learned. We were all keen to stay and ‘bog fly’, as my husband calls it when people slow down driving past road accident scenes.

As we waited in the drizzle, we compared celebrity-spotting stories. One of us had seen Gwyneth Paltrow in a supermarket in London; Dave saw Steven Spielberg down an alley in Venice. I’d seen Nelson Mandela twice. Most of my spots were thanks to my time as a journo. I’d seen The Queen, King Charles and Prince Andrew up close, and Prince Harry up close twice. I’d interviewed Stella McCartney. Blah, blah. My favourite celebrity encounter of all time was with the great soccer player Pele. He signed my reporters’ notebook. There’s more. I’ll tell you the story one day.

We stood there, in our raincoats, and I hoped nobody would lose patience and want to leave. We were a few hours into visiting embassies as part of DC’s open embassy event.

Its official title is Around The World Embassy Tour.

Sixty non-EU countries participated this year, opening their doors to the public, offering tours, free gifts and cultural experiences.

(Member countries of the European Union open their embassies on a different weekend.)

Instead of attempting to park in Massachussets Avenue, we had opted to walk through a section of Rock Creek Park from our house in Georgetown.

The Clintons’ house is located in the dead end of a short street off Massachusetts. The dead end is also where we were going to enter the forest to get home.

The Clintons’ home is neat and historic-looking, with shuttered windows but no front wall. The blinds on all the windows were down.

‘Don’t say it,’ I was thinking. “Don’t any of you be all grown-up and say, “Let’s just go. We’re adults. We’re too old to stand around trying to catch a glimpse of a famous person’.”

Thankfully, things started happening – fast. Suddenly there were people all over the place, all around the front door. A car pulled up. A person with an open umbrella was at the front door.

An old lady emerged.

‘Is this Hillary’s mum?’ I wondered. ‘Who is this?’

You know the answer, dear reader.

It was she.

She looked almost frail: a little bent, a little thin. Granted, it was drizzling. Granted, she is in her seventies now. But wasn’t that strange?

I think of Hillary Clinton as being just electric with intellectual power. I do, I imagine her literally buzzing with thought (and possibly outrage – although that could be projection on my part).

I think of that famous highlighted hairdo as a sort of helmet, worn in the corridors of power like a hard hat. I imagine every bit of her as hard-set: her jaw, her gaze, her shoulders, her legs, all locked for battle.

But here she was, eyes down, stepping slowly and gingerly -- not stoically unmoving at all. I have a memory of a checked blanket, over her shoulders or over her arm, for the car.

Surely my memory is exaggerating?

Funny though, how age exaggerates our vulnerability.

And then she was gone.

Her car and the black bus headed to Massachusetts Avenue. We’d just come from there.

There are more embassies in Washington DC than anywhere else in the world. There are 177 of them. Not all of them are ‘on Mass’, but several are, and many are in the vicinity.

(It’s funny when people here say ‘on Mass’. Firstly, if you have the opportunity to say a fantastic word with four ‘s’es in it, then do. Secondly, don’t you realise it sounds like you’re saying the foreign phrase ‘en masse’?)

You could hear the Bolivian music pumping out of its embassy some distance down ‘Mass Ave’ (another popular shortening). Dancers in colourful costumes were performing out front. The food was out back. We watched the dancers for a while then caved. The wafting smells of hot meat pies, sandwiches and doughnuts were too much.

Thanks Bolivia for opening your doors to us. Lunch was an adventure! We tried your chorizo dog (good), your saltenas (superb but served too hot) and your sweet bunuelos (just thank you. Thank you.)

We all tried a saltena, which is a Bolivian empanada. Essentially this is a little meat pie, and it’s shaped like a mini Cornish pastie. But there are significant differences.

One: a saltena is fried, not baked. They’re not greasy because the pastry is very strong. But fried they are.

Two: empana pastry is sweet. It might seem odd, but it works.

People in Bolivia eat saltenas mid-morning or mid-afternoon. In the morning, they’ll often pair a warm empanada with a dark, bitter hot chocolate.

Three: a saltena always contains a boiled egg.

I will always seize an opportunity to mention Scotch Eggs. Picture one now: the boiled egg encased in sausage meat, rolled in breadcrumbs (or smashed Cornflakes if your mother was Betty Jones) and then deep-fried. There are overlaps.

I admit, the overlaps are not remarkable – especially as Scotch Eggs are traditionally served cold. And boy, were our saltenas hot! The meat gravy was Mars-hot. We all had our first bites and then stood over our pies, legs apart, blowing on the inside of our saltenas and then going in again too soon and making those open-mouth, hot-hot faces while flapping the free hand.

The Sri Lankan embassy was delightful, with a band playing live music at the end of a courtyard pool, a conservatory filled with paintings and gifts on the way out: a milky sweetmeat square and a box of Sri Lankan tea.

But honestly. Who still gives wild animals as gifts? It’s so eighteenth century.

Sri Lanka did. In 1984.

Dave and I didn’t know.

We only posed with this baby elephant because there’s a picture like this of us with an elephant in India, taken 20 years ago. Then we discovered that a baby elephant was actually gifted by Sri Lanka to then-president Ronald Reagan in 1984. Poor Jayathu the baby elephant, he died within the year.

Maybe it’s nice that there’s a statue of him (and look how he’s grown).

Here’s a coincidence. (Do you read into coincidences? I do, a bit.)

We wanted to visit the South African Embassy but it was closed.

Instead, South Africa was represented along with several other African nations in the African Union building. Coincidence 1: The African Union building is on Wisconsin Avenue, in easy walking distance from our house. It’s much closer than the SA Embassy.

Coincidence 2: Parkmont, the school my son attends and that I drive across town to twice a day, was first housed in what is now the African Union building. The very same building!

Okay, maybe it’s not earth-shattering.

Regardless, here are some of the works on permanent exhibition at the AU building, along with four covetable lampshades that were produced during a workshop on the day.

PS: Dave nearly bought the Lion of Judah T-shirt from Ethiopia. We watched One Love, the new Bob Marley biopic, on Friday night.