Day in a D.C. Life

Like most of the country, spring/summer has come a bit early to D.C. On one such recent perfect day I took the opportunity to enjoy the weather and play tourist.

A pretty dogwood tree in full bloom and my pre-lunch snack of a red velvet cupcake.

Sitting in front of the Newseum to eat my cupcake and looking up at the First Amendment carved on the outside.

The primary reason for this visit to the Newseum: to check out the new "Every Four Years" exhibit, covering the press and presidential elections.

Costumes from "Saturday Night Live"! The suits Tina Fey and Amy Poehler wore as Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton, as well as the snowsuit Jason Sudeikis wore as Todd Palin and the moose costume worn by someone.

Paraphernalia from my two favorite news shows: Props and press passes from "The Daily Show" on the left and a debate script -- with his notes! -- from Anderson Cooper 360 on the right.

Tim Russert's infamous "Florida!" marker board from the 2000 debacle.

After the Newseum it was time for lunch.

Teasim used to be a favorite of mine, but since they took the meatball bento box off the menu, I've struggled to find something I like. This udon shrimp soup was only ok.

Next up: American History Museum

I was fascinated by these old firefighters helmet. They look so regal!

Daniel Radcliffe's robe from the first "Harry Potter" and Nastia Liukin's leotard from the 2008 Olympics and a torch from the 1984 Olympics.

A full-size house taken from Massachusetts. I've always skipped this exhibit for some reason but it covers the history of five families that lived in one house over the course of 200 years. Fascinating.

The Jefferson Bible.The bibles on the left are ones he cut verses out of, and the one on the right is what he pieced together to form "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Jefferson is my all-time favorite Founding Father so this was just awesome to see.

Exhibit on the slaves of Monticello, which documented the families that spent generations working the plantation. Also just fascinating.

After relaxing in front of the Museum for a few minutes, basking in the beautiful day, I decided to swing by the National Archives to see what special exhibits they had.

Looking up at the Archives while waiting to go in. Stunning sky.

After that I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the metro.

I was struck by post after post of the D.C. flag, American flag, and British flag, in honor of the U.K.'s Prime Minister David Cameron visiting this week. I may or may not have skipped a bit as I rejoiced in three of my favorite flags hanging side by side by side.

Finally my day concluded with a trip to Foggy Bottom.

Thanks to wine night at the restaurant Circa, my friend Lauren and I were able to enjoy a Prosecco-filled Happy Hour on their patio in the 70 degree weather. Perfection.



History Lesson: World War I and Britain

I feel like I use my journalism degree all the time, but my history degree less often. I chose it as my major in high school and never wavered from it. Always a passion, it was also going to help me get into law school, but in the end just made me happy. Now, on occasion, and maybe only just for me, I want to use it.

In the course of my history education, from grade school through college, more time was always spent on America's role in, and the general impact of, World War II than on World War I. In my experience it was just never discussed and analyzed as much. And by comparison's sake, I don't really think we were impacted the same way in terms of resources and personnel. Why we were fighting WWII was also more clear: in the simplest form, it was because of Pearl Harbor. While WWI, in its simplest form, began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And in 1914, and even today, not sure how much effect the death of an Austrian has on America.

The memorial to the residents of D.C. who fought in WWI.
The only WWI memorial on the Mall.

I began thinking of all this because the last British combat veteran of WWI recently died. Just several months after the last American veteran died. My knowledge of WWI finally went beyond what I learned from "All Quiet on the Western Front" and that awful scene in "Legends of the Fall," when I took a British history course my junior year of college. (Which was actually not a good class in large part due to a sub par professor, who happened to be a Duke grad. I'm not saying that was the reason he wasn't a good professor.)

But the one thing -- literally the one thing -- I remember from the course textbook was the effect the Great War had on Great Britain. They gave so many of their young men to The Cause that they effectively lost the equivalent of a generation's worth of leaders. Potential leaders in science, industry, literature, business, and politics -- gone. That still astounds me. Now, they've managed to do pretty well since then and not to be obvious, but it did let some females step up to the plate, too. (Hello, Margaret Thatcher.) But who knows what may have been achieved. What disease cured? What groundbreaking business formed? What literary masterpiece written? What world leader launched?

The summer after taking the course I went to London for summer school. The scars of the Second World War are everywhere, from the singed dome of St. Paul's to a plaque on a building explaining how it was rebuilt after the Blitz. But WWI and its effects are still seen, too, like in the Imperial War Museum.

I loved this museum not just because I love history, but because it was the first museum I visited where "home front" wasn't in reference to America. It presented the view of wars I thought I knew so much about, from a completely different perspective. And through each floor of exhibits, my earth shifted a little each time I saw the word "home," and knew it wasn't the home I knew. At one point you can step through a mock up of a trench. (Trench warfare is one of the most lasting legacies of the conflict.) While I'm sure the mock trench was nothing like the real thing, it still made its point: dark, tight, loud, and even smelly. An entire generation lost in these trenches, so far from their own home fronts? It is still unfathomable.

Today in Britain, veterans of all conflicts are remembered each November with remembrance poppies, which began as a way to honor the Great War's fallen. When I moved back to England after college, I was there for Remembrance Day and felt like the city was awash in paper poppies, including these outside Westminster Abbey. Resiliency, recovery, and remembrance, that's the British way.

One of my most favorite scenese from an episode of "Doctor Who" covers a lot of these points. (What could be more British than that?) It beautifully shows the sacrifices asked of the young men of Britain at that time, the hell they went through, and how they came out on the other side. (And the young man happens to be Sam from "Love Actually.")

It was to be "the war to end all wars." Oh how we all wish that were the case, that the 20th and 21st centuries weren't riddled with conflict after conflict after conflict. Especially as we've been fighting our own wars for a decade now. When all is said and done we don't yet know the final death toll, the final footprint on history. 100 years from now there will be an obituary on the last surviving member of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and who knows what his or her legacy will entail.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

-Laurence Binyon

Day 232: Time travelling

With the exception of maybe my senior year and kindergarten photos, I could do without the rest of my yearbook pictures. But thanks to the funnest web site ever, Yearbook Yourself, I got the chance to try again, in five different decades, by seeing what my yearbook picture would look like in different years.

Some of them were awful, some gave me an unnecessary double chin, and some were just kind of creepy. The highlights:

1950 and 1956


1960 and 1968

1974 and 1990

I like 1974 because it's only two years after my Mom graduated and looks a lot like her hair in her picture. (Sorry, Mom, the 1972 person had a bob.) I like the 1950s and 1960s ones the best. I would totally have been ok in those decades as long as I could be an angry feminist turned hippie. And maybe see the Beatles live, too.

The only way is jumping

Pictures will be added Tuesday 24/10/06.

While weekends are definitely made sweeter the more tiresome the week is, I really would appreciate them just as much without the loooong work weeks. Nothing bad or out of the ordinary happened, just long and tiring. I think I fell asleep at 9:30 two, possibly three nights this week. I have no idea how I used to stay up all night during college doing work, and still put in a full day of work and classes and hanging out the next day. And as I write this I realize that next month I will have been out of college for six months. Wow that just hit me like a ton of bricks.

Anyway, once again the TimeOut London web site gave me something to do this weekend. Without fail, everytime I check out the site I find something to do. This Saturday it was the Bloomsbury Festival, in, you guessed it, Bloomsbury. More specifically Brunswick Square, less than 100 yards from the Russell Square tube stop, and the neighborhood I stayed when I studied here. I love any excuse that brings me back to this area. As it was the first area of London I ever saw and explored on my own, it will always hold a special place in my heart.

I started off listening to a quartet perform on the main stage, Portico Quartet they were called. They played mellow music with no words. I am terrible at music instruments, but one guy had a cello, one a drum and cymbals, one a long gold brass instrument, and one some metal thing I named a goompa, after the villains in Super Mario Brothers. Yep. I then walked around some of the stalls they had set up, as well as what was billed as Bloomsbury’s first farmer’s market. I bought a cheap beaded bracelet and necklace set at the stalls, an infamous 1.50 Borough Market brownie, and then potatoes and tomatoes at the farmer’s market. I felt very grown up for some reason buying vegetables at a farmer’s market. And then kid-like as I marveled at the purple cauliflower. I would have bought some just because of the way it looked, but it would have been too pretty to eat.

I then made my way across the street to The Brunswick, for an “aerial performance.” The Brunswick is this concrete monstrosity that reminds me more than a little of Davie Hall. It has flats on the top and shops on the bottom. (“With condos on the top, whose rent keeps open our shop…” Sorry, “Rent” break.) Last summer when I was here it had nothing but the tiniest Boots ever, sketchy-looking flats, and temporarily housed my favorite sandwich shop. Now, however, it’s been transformed. It’s still a concrete mess, but is in the process of becoming “Bloomsbury’s high street.” There’s a giant Waitrose supermarket, a cinema, cd store, Superdrug, French Connection and some other higher-end shops, and of course a Starbucks. There are lots of benches in the open-air center and on this day performers and musicians.

Anyway, on one side were performers suspended from wires, doing some type of interpreative artistic dance. It began with a woman wearing angel wings on the very top. The site of this made a little boy behind me start screaming, and kind of scared me a bit too. It’s just surreal to look up and see an angel standing eight stories up on a roof. I’m used to seeing odd things in the city, but not angels on top of shopping centers. Other performers came out then, climbing on the sides and two went down the middle and “danced.” (By the end I swear they were just flailing.) It was interesting, if for no other reason than seeing people come out of the back doors of their flats and seeing people suspended in the air in front of them. I don’t know if they weren’t warned or what, but one lady looked especially intrigued/terrified.

The performance ended and I set off for lunch at my favorite pizza place from last time. For 3 you get a personal pizza and a soft drink, as long as you take it away. So I did just that, and ate it in the shade in Russell Square. Russell Square happens to have one of my favorite fountains ever, which is saying a lot as most of you know fountains are in my top five of favorite things ever. Well they would if I actually had a codified list, which I don’t. I’m anal but not that anal. Yet. Anyway, I like the fountain because there are no barriers, it’s just there, you can walk right up to it and through it. It just feels like a natural part of the landscape, like it springs from the ground, and it wants people to be near it, to enjoy it. It was the first fountain, and I still think the only fountain, I’ve seen in person like this.

After lunch I went back to the festival to join a free walking tour on the history of Bloomsbury. It had started raining by this point, and would continue off and on the rest of the day, but the tour was still enjoyable. It was led by a short, thin British woman, whose name I don’t know, but I named her Jane, because she just seemed like a Jane. She said things like “such a grand old boy” and “blight on our history” and I just found her very British.

But before the tour was officially underway, a short pause while I run into a low-lying tree branch that I swear appeared out of nowhere. I hit it so hard, and it was such a surprise, that after I ran into it, I looked up, saw the branch, and thought, “Hey, a branch, I should move.” Then I realized my teeth had rattled and my head was throbbing. Too late to duck. I think only two people saw me, actually that can’t be true, there were a lot of people behind me, but they did ask if I was ok while trying not to laugh. I wanted to be like, “It’s ok, laugh. Happens all the time.”

Although I must take the time to say this. Just like last time I traveled, I am not as clumsy in this time zone, on this continent, as I am at home. I know no one will believe this, but it’s true. While I occasionally trip on the uneven sidewalks, I barely run into things, never just fall out of nowhere, and I have not once fallen while running up and down the many stairs at work 10 or 15 times a day. And yes, I am knocking on every piece of wood right now and muttering “no jinx no jinx” under my breath.

Anyway, the tour was based on walking the boundaries of where the Foundling Hospital was in the 1600s, and looking at a map from 1769. It had its boring bits, I really didn’t need to know the history of stucco, but as “Jane” was constantly pointing out what original in the neighborhood, I really enjoyed. I literally get chills when seeing a plaque on the sidewalk that’s been there since 1730, or a doorway there since the 1800s, or the window to the room where Charles Dickens wrote “The Pickwick Papers,” even though I’m not even a huge Dickens fan. Jane clearly knew her history and had a love from her neighborhood that made the tour very nice.

I had planned on going to the Foundling Museum after the tour, but it had started to rain and I was tired and my back sore, so I sat at a Pret on Bernard street to read. I then went to Aldwych in search of a cheap store I had seen awhile ago, only to discover it was a “New Look” store on High Holborn. In other words, a store of which there are at least two of on Oxford Street, where I had just been on Friday. It of course was raining hard at this point and I was irritable, tired, and wet, so I cheated and took the tube home instead of walking, and made myself a good meal of a salad with my fresh tomatoes, chicken, and farmer’s market potatoes. The most well-balanced meal I’ve had in awhile.

Sunday was rainy and cold. Church, long lunch with people from church, to the library to stock up on books, and then back to the flat to read, drink tea, and watch BBC. We finally got our tv to get English-speaking channels, with an antenna that means everyone has an ever-present aura, but at least it’s in English. And I have been reading up a storm here, I think three books last week alone. It helps having nothing to do on reception at work. And it’s the best way to unwind after work too.

In general, I’d just like to say I’m happy here. I miss home, but I’m not homesick, I love it here, but still want to try other places. For once, I’m not restless. And it feels great. And Mom and Aunt LuAnn will be here in less than two weeks and I’m so excited I can barely stand it.