Windows to the World, Now Open

Thousands Get Rare Glimpse of Diplomats' Side of Capital

One minute, talk at the Finnish Embassy yesterday was on food -- salmon spread on sourdough bread, sweet bread called pulla, and meatballs -- until the description of the Finnish recipes spread out on a huge table turned to a rye and rice pastry from Karelia.

"That's the place Russia stole from us," one of the servers said of the region lost to the Soviets decades ago, in the same matter-of-fact tone she had used seconds before for simply listing ingredients.

Politics, culture and food, intertwined -- a blend that played out all day yesterday with the start of Passport DC, a two-week exhibition in which dozens of embassies open their doors to places typically seen only by diplomats and people with visa requests and official business. Thousands attended, standing in long lines along Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue and in quieter neighborhoods around Northwest where the stately government outposts often go less noticed.

A Czech official handed out pamphlets about R&D centers as a bagpiper and drummer played Czech rock outside on the patio. Huge posters outside the Hungarian Embassy touted the "safe, European" economy, while inside a dancer performed with a jug of sloshing red wine on her head. The Finnish ambassador boasted to a packed room of the transparency and openness of his country as Finns in textile giant Marimekko T-shirts milled around.

The day was primarily promotional, light and upbeat, and trivia was more prevalent than heavy-duty foreign policy.

"Did you know the contact lens was invented in the Czech Republic?" a woman with blond pigtails, a crown of flowers and a traditional Moravian jumper-dress asked guests as they arrived on the sunny patio of the embassy. "And the sugar cube?"

Passport DC stems from a program last spring, when European Union embassies opened their doors for one day and were shocked when almost 40,000 people came. Those same embassies held open houses yesterday and many will hold concerts, lectures and art exhibitions this week. From May 11 through May 16, cultural centers, museums and some embassies will hold various programs, then there will be a second open house May 17 with non-European embassies including Iraq, Japan and Peru. Fifty-five embassies and 20 cultural centers will host public events during the two weeks.

Lines were long in many places yesterday, particularly at the British Embassy, the Portuguese Embassy and, by afternoon, the Finnish Embassy. Attendees mixed on the Massachusetts Avenue sidewalk with women in pink participating in a 26.2-mile walk to raise money for breast cancer research and treatment. A support van for the walk, with bras strapped all over it, drove up and down the stretch, and volunteers with the walk rang cow bells (to summon the image of milk).

Some came to the embassies because of their heritage, like Joan Janshego, 68. She visited the Hungarian Embassy with her sister in hopes of experiencing the (similar) Romanian culture they grew up with. She had performed ethnic dances as a child and speaks Romanian. "It's just nice even talking to the staff," she said.

Leena Nevalainen-Smith, a 49-year-old from Finland who lives in Cleveland, had come to Washington with her son and American-born husband to renew her passport. Late yesterday morning, she was looking around the urbane, open, cube-shaped embassy of her homeland.

"There's something about the airiness, the light" that is very Finnish, she said.

Others came with an eye to the future and crowded the desks at each embassy promoting the countries' investment potential.

Others came simply for the wow factor of seeing how the diplomatic half -- such a presence in the District, with 10,000 of them in the city -- lives.

"In the Slovakian Embassy, the ambassador showed us his office," said Katharine Liang, a 23-year-old from Seattle who is doing a yearlong program at the National Institutes of Health. She was in a group with Adam Suhy, a 22-year-old teacher from North Carolina. "I got to sit in his chair," Suhy said.

Many said they were lured by free goodies, and the lines were long for a tiny cup of Hungarian goulash soup, Portuguese custard and the Czech Republic's Pilsner Urquell beer -- until the beverage ran out shortly after noon as the sun beat down.

"Time to go to France," someone shouted.