Yoko Ono was the first.
I saw her at a function at the United Nations five years ago.
From that moment, the UN to me became a place where you took it for granted to see the world-famous figures filing past.
This year, my collection started with Sergey Lavrov, the outspoken Russian foreign minister, rushing up the 46th street. He spent more than twenty years at the Soviet, then Russian mission at the UN and must know New York so well that the current permanent representative, Vitaly Churkin, could barely keep up behind him (no wonder he was eventually not chosen to replace Lavrov last year).
A moment later, a Norwegian TV reporter was bringing her country's prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, to a live interview at the press island on the First Avenue. He had to squeeze through between the two sections of the police fence but did not seem to mind.
Once he finished and left, a bigger group of people breezed through the concrete barricades. Kevin Rudd, the relatively new prime minister of Australia, almost touched me as I was fiddling with my notebook atop the concrete block.
Then there was Miguel Angel Moratinos, the Spanish foreign minister, and Lamberto Dini, a veteran Italian politician.
And I could have been forgiven had I not noticed Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Only people turning their heads alerted me towards this understated billionaire philantropist.
Others could probably be forgiven if they were thinking nothing about a lone man standing patiently outside the main entrance while a lone journalist was anxiously trying to revive the microphones on his video camera that for the first - and last - time stopped working, precisely at the worst possible moment. The man was Valdas Adamkus, the Lithuanian president, and the unfortunate journalist was me.
The next day, the first was Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president, materializing almost out of nowhere in from of me as I was entering the building through the media entrance. Largely pushed to the sidelines even in his domain of the foreign policy by an assertive prime minister, he was rushing to the riverside spot where Polish journalists had already set up their cameras.
A day later, it was Boris Tadic, the president of Serbia, who I nearly bumped into on that same 46th street. He had been announcing the UN debate on the independence of Kosovo to the Serbian television journalists just moments earlier.
Then Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, suddenly appeared from the UN cafeteria. Do the world leaders also find that the food there is rather good and inexpensive?
Stories like this are plentiful from anyone who finds oneself in the crowd of thousands of people converging on this yearly talking shop.
An Asian minister falling asleep in an important meeting, a South American president pointedly ignoring journalists' questions, someone nearly stumbling over a president from the Middle East who would soon show thumbs-down to the US president's speech, someone else missing that shot of herself with a prime minister from a European power rushing past.
Too many leaders are gathered in one place for everyone of them to stay in the same cocoon of exclusiveness that surrounds them back home.
Except, maybe, for some African dictators who enjoyed the largest security detail, plushest hotels, noisiest motorcades and teams of yes-men, and seemed never to land from their high orbits onto the soil of ever-rushing, cosmopolitan and ignorant New York.
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