Corbeau's Embassy Row Adventure

Saturday, I went into DC with two friends that I haven't blogged about yet, so I will call them Yoosh and B. We went into DC for the annual Embassy Row Open House.

It was a beautiful day, perfect for walking around the city. We started with Columbia, which had a tour of the ambassador's house, which was beautiful. In the garden they had some sort of jellied fruit on cheese. It was gross.

To be perfectly honest, I hate jellied fruit, so it didn't have much of a chance. The volunteers were passing out various tourist swag, with Colombia's new tourist theme.

Columbia: The only risk is not wanting to leave.

I found this to be freaking hilarious.

After that we went to India, which was my personal favorite. They had their best bollywood dj rocking the house, we were treated to a excellent choreographed dance show, and then given an entire plate of amazing, and free, Indian food.

We also went to Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan, but none of them were as cool as India. Ethiopia had a speaker, Nigeria was prepping for something, but we'll never know if the event ever occurred, since we gave up after checking back a couple of times. We were going to eat at Ghana, but they had this massive non-moving line. Bangladesh had kids performing folk dances, which was adorable. Pakistan had a small bazaar, and were blasting euro-pop at ear-peircing levels.

I'm not sure why. Perhaps to let everyone know that they were the cool embassy. Pakistan also had food. The only thing we recognized were samosas, which we had also eaten at the Indian embassy. So I decided to pick something at random from the menu. "Can I get the Julab Gotti?" I asked the man.
"What?"
"Uh, number 6?"
"What is the Number 6?"
"Er...Julab...Gotti?"
At that point, the guy started laughing, took my money, and plopped two enormous balls of fried bread that had spent the last five hours soaking in honey down on my plate.

After that, both of my friends ordered samosas.

After the embassies we headed down to the Asia festival in downtown DC. They had a martial arts arena, and we watched some Tai Kwan Do guys kick the crap out of some wooden planks. They were awesome. This one guy threw an apple in the air, kicked it, and it exploded all over the audience that wasn't me.

I cheered. As did everyone else who wasn't covered in apple sauce.

We also went down to the cultural stage, and watched some belly dancers.

Have you ever seen a cultural festival without belly dancers? I haven't. I'm convinced that I could throw a dance/culutral/garage sale festival in my back yard and belly dancers would show up.

There were also Mongolian dancers, and the Indonesian embassy sent a group of muscians. While we were watching the dancers, we noticed that all the people around us were eating bowls of what appeared to be jello floating in milk. We finally worked up our courage to ask what it was, and that's how we found ourselves in front of the Thai shaved ice stand.

Neither of my friends would get some, but they did advise me as to toppings, since both of them have actually lived in China, and knew that some of them were nasty.

So there was a whole line of nice, elderly Asian people, standing behind bowls of various weird things. The first lady scooped some shaved ice in a bowl, and poured coconut milk over it. She handed it to the topping line.

"What you want?" the first guy asked,
"uh, what's good?"
"It's all good!" They all started shouting and pointing their ladles at their topping and telling me how good it was.
"Get the red bean paste" Yoosh told me.

The guy poured an enormous scoop of red bean paste on top of my ice. Then I also got Ai Yu jelly (which looks like yellow jello)
Grass jelly (which looks like black jello) and then had them top it off with a good squeeze of Hershey's chocolate syrup.

It was...strangely delicious. The grass jelly in particular was very refreshing, and the red bean paste was really yummy. Sweet, with a nice texture and a really great flavor.

In fact, it was all really good, but I have no idea about how to describe the flavors I tasted other than... strangely delicious.