Here is a guest post from Daddy about the girls and Grandma Sandy's visit and tour of the State Department on Monday, followed by a bunch of pictures.

On Monday, I finally had the chance to do something I’ve wanted to organize for a long time – lunch with the girls and Sandy in the fancy State Department dining room on the top floor, and then a private tour of the formal State Department diplomatic reception rooms, which they typically don’t even allow the public to view.  It was a great success – we only had about 45 minutes to an hour for the tour, but when we had to leave, the girls asked if they could stay longer to finish looking at some of the artwork and objects, had many good questions, and then wanted to know when they could come back!

We started with lunch, which was in the dining room for senior officials and visiting diplomats.  It only has about 10 tables, so you need to get reservations there in advance.  Though it’s just buffet-style, the girls (typically picky eaters) declared it “delicious” (it wasn’t, but was suitable), and had soup, salad, rice, grilled chicken, fish (!), several rolls, tea/iced tea, and, of course, several desserts.  The best part about the dining room was the balcony overlooking the Lincoln Memorial and the rest of the Mall, and it was open during lunch, so we went outside and took pictures.

Our tour guide, a State Dept cultural preservationist, met us in the dining room, and then walked us through the 4-5 adjoining diplomatic reception rooms, including the enormous Benjamin Franklin Room (the “Father of the American Foreign Service”) and smaller more intimate rooms (more here), pointing out key items she thought we’d enjoy.  Among the most memorable for the girls: 

–  The carpet on the floor of the Franklin Room, which is the largest single-piece of carpet in North America.  The girls noticed that it had 13 stars in the middle of the room, and 50 throughout the room, which they jumped from one to the other on.  It was so large they had to bring it in via crane through the windows, and when it was finally laid, one of the decorators said ruefully “Did we realize it was this mauve?” 

–   A mask of Franklin that was made by pouring plaster on his face and he had to breathe through straws in his nostrils.  It was evidently painful to produce, but resulted in the most accurate depiction of him.

–  A half-finished painting of signers of the Constitution, because some of the key members depicted were too ill to travel to sit for it.

–  A beautiful bust (of James Monroe?) that in its very last stages was split in half due to an occlusion, so half of it was mounted in a frame as a 3D portrait so it could be salvaged.

–  Original porcelain belonging to George and Martha Washington with their initials, and some of it produced in China with names of the 13 colonies (and a few of them spelled wrong, like Massachusets).

–   A lovely plush gold couch with a rope in front of it, which the girls had an extremely hard time resisting sitting on.

–  The desk on which the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, marking the end of the American Revolution.

–  A small table in the reception room which HRC ordered exactly to size, to make it small enough to be intimate and only for one-on-one conversations with visiting counterparts.

Then, just before leaving, I took them downstairs a floor to the Secretary’s suite, named “Mahogany Row” for its wood paneled walls that are hung with portraits of many of the Secretaries of State, including Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, etc.  They met some of Daddy’s colleagues, and then were able to look into the Secretary’s personal sitting room, and heard him on a conference call, but unfortunately didn’t see him personally (which could be a good thing, considering they may have started singing the 2004 JibJab spoof of him which they still love).  And we heard that literally a minute or two after we left, he came out of his office to play fetch with Ben, his new Diplomutt.  Next time…