Diplomatic Pouch | Mike Peters

Several European embassies showed their colors last week at the International Spring Carnival in Beijing's Chaoyang Park. Irish Ambassador Declan Kelleher, representing the "country of honor" at this year's event, kicked things off by introducing Jig: The Story of Irish Dance, a Dublin-based dance show, and Macnas, a walkabout performance troupe that mixes costumes, music, processions and physical feats with the odd beast on stilts. This international temple fair featured many foreign flavors, such as landscapes, decorations, music and performances. Diplomats from countries including the Netherlands, Britain, France and Russia introduced dancers, national customs and a sampling of their cuisines.

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Croatia's former president Stjepan Mesic is signing copies of his new book, China and the Balkans, at events around Zagreb this month. The first chapter describes how China is taking the road to peaceful development, Xinhua News Agency reports.

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Katerina Stai-Failadis (pictured, left) works as a professor of Greek literature in Beijing, but her students may have seen her online this month in a different role: champion of olive oil.

Stai-Failadis, the wife of the Greek embassy's press counselor, teamed up with BTV cooking-show hostess Han Ping (right) to produce a Mediterranean feast with an underlying message of health: Olive oil is good for you. The result was a mouth-watering multi-media presentation, inspiring lip-smacking from television viewers, online followers of the embassy website and readers of a 60-plus page magazine produced by the embassy. Stai-Failadis says she uses olive oil in Chinese cooking as well, and she included her adapted recipes for two Chinese classics, dumplings and mooncakes. The mooncakes are stuffed with almonds, in the style of the cosmopolitan Greek island of Mykonos, Stai-Failadis' home.

Quality olive oil is as basic to healthy Greek life as tea is to China's, she said.

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Argentina's Ambassador Gustavo Martino and his wife Jennifer Irwin were in Tianjin earlier this month for the opening and the final of the Snow World Cup polo tournament, which featured Argentina in the final. Other VIPs included Zhang Jungang, vice-mayor of the city of Tianjin; Richard Caleel, president of the Federation of International Polo; Luis Lalor, president of the Argentine Polo Association; and Luis Schmidt, Chile's ambassador to China. Martino and Lalor are actively promoting Argentine polo in China, particularly in Beijing and Tianjin, where there is a strong presence of players, coaches and ponies.

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The Italian embassy announced to its expatriate community in China that it plans to establish an association of young Italians in China (AGIC). Open to anyone who wants to join, the association will be officially constituted on Saturday, March 9, at the auditorium of the Italian Cultural Institute in Beijing. More information is available at the association's website: www.assogic.com.

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"We have been working on quite a few fronts with our Greek colleagues to bring more Chinese tourists here, Chinese Ambassador Du Qiwen told European journalists in Athens this month. "The latest project is the production of a four-episode, 120 minutes, TV documentary series entitled Glamorous Greece. A six-member crew from China Central Television was filming in Greece for five weeks," he adds. "The program is going to be broadcast on CCTV documentary channel, which has a home viewership of 800 million and has an extensive cooperation network with the world's TV media. I want to say that in the future, if all of a sudden, you find big crowds of Chinese tourists clicking cameras in front of historical monuments, and you get tired of them, you should know who are partly to blame."

Send embassy news to michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 02/17/2013 page5)