Revelations

As I delve further and further into the world of NPR and the city of DC, I realize just how much there is to the world that I hadn't paid attention to before. At the office, everything is a novelty: company e-mails, conference calls, boardroom meetings. All the corporate tradition is something I had only ever heard of before in legend, and on Office Space. Thankfully, NPR is what I like think of as 'corporate lite'. The umbrella of casual Friday extends over the entire work week, and the weekends are a free for all. Any competition between co-workers is channeled into pick-up games of waste-paper basketball. It could be worse.

Around town everything is new, too. On weekends I leave the house in the morning and walk down to Colombia Heights to the metro station there. In the half hour that it takes me, I pass through neighborhoods of big Victorian three-stories, then move into the tightly packed Queen Anne row houses with their scrolled balconies and shuttered windows, their stateliness undermined only a little by their peeling paint and the faded and mismatched lawn chairs on the stoops. Just after I pass the house with the miniature adobe style village on the front gate, just beyond the yard with about 6 statues of the virgin nestled into the various potted plants, the homes give way to a stretch of rudimentary commercial blocks with signs in two, sometimes three languages. There is Herman's hardware store, the Guatemalan Bakery, Ropa Latina clothing boutique, and four or five pupuserias. There is a Brazilian Beauty hair salon, and a Puerto Rican souvenir shop. What I am most excited about, however, is the helote trailer parked in the front yard of an old house, behind their chain-link fence. I am hoping, in some Brigadoon-like glory I will one day round the corner to find them with windows flung open selling the tacos and helote and tamales that they advertise on the side.

The small, colorful storefronts give way to the shining, sculpted behemoths of Target and Best Buy as I get close to the metro, though still there is an empanada stand on the opposite curb from Payless, and the kids running around in the newly built fountain are shouting at each other in Spanish. The magic of DC is that when I emerge from the metro downtown, close to work, I will find myself in the middle of Chinatown, under the elaborate friendship arch and her paper lanterns. The ethnicities here are as numerous as the stops themselves, and each few blocks you stumble into another neighborhood ripe with its own language and culture.

Big Day!

Friday night I arrived home exhausted by a full run of 18 hours of awesome.

Work is still incredible, partly because it's so new, but partly just because it's NPR. In the afternoon, the acoustic, flamenco-influenced jam duo Rodrigo y Gabriela were on the fifth floor and they played a few songs for us in the middle of the office. Incredible. Will post video later.

After that goose-bump inducing performace, the rest of the afternoon flew by in a daze, utnil I was pulled fro my musical high by an offer of free tickets to the Shakespeare Theater to see Helen Mirren in Phedre. Of course I said yes.

I had just enough time to get off the bus, throw on some more appropriate theatre-going clothes, and jump right back on the bus to chinatown and the show. The performances were a little scattered, but that falls more to the director than the cast, and over all it was beautiful. Depressing, but beautiful.

And I get to do this every week!

Introductions all around

So I moved into my home-away-from-home this afternoon. It's a great old house, I'd say about 100, 120 years old? It's got a friendly red door on the outside and a spectrum of richly colored paints on the inside. But even better than the paint job is the family who inhabits it. Here's the rundown:

Cindy Morgan-Jaffe: Woman of the house, mother to three grown children--Anna, Claire, and Rose--and parent to the twins. She owns a software company and a moped. She is originally from Wyoming, so she knows how it is to be a Westerner in the big city.


Tanya Renney: The other woman of the house, biological mother to the twins. She's got Western connections, too, with family in Livingston and some cousins in Helena. She recently built a greenhouse onto the side of the house, which is now home to two tortoises. She also loves to cook, so I will keep you updated on the epicurean side of things as well.

Clara: The au pair from Brazil. I haven't really talked to her much yet, but I do know she has been in DC for 6 years and that she is very good at french braiding hair.

Paul: One half of the twins, he plays the cello and has recently enrolled in acting classes. He is very blond and very blue-eyed and sometimes goes by the alias "the Swede". He is not Swedish. He does, however, love Harry Potter and the back yard and being 8.

Olivia: The other half of the twins. She plays the violin and often sports the french braids in her hair that are the handiwork of Clara. She is starting to think boys are not quite so gross as they used to be, but still not worth her time. She likes horses, of course, and hiding behind the sofa to avoid bath time.

Sanji: The aging pitbull of the house. Very sweet, but please don't let her out the front door as she has a tendency to run off

Hannah: A mutt, part basset and part something else. She is low and stubby and shaggy, with one ear that goes up and one that goes down and a tail that goes all directions at once.

Study up, there WILL be a quiz.

Natty Hist

After an uneventful train ride--marked, however, by the first time I have ever been in New York City (or below it)-- I arrived safely in Washington, D.C. I took a taxi to Peter and Jessica's and promptly settled in to the spare room. I spent my first full day in the city cruising around on the metro and wandering aimlessly through the Museum of Natural History and the American History Museum.

I'm doing much of the same today, riding around town, trying to get used to being just another drop in a sea of 600,000.

First Impressions: Everyone in DC has incredible front yards, and it's not half as scary as I expected.

I'll upload the few photos that I took when I get the proper cord for my camera. Until then, I leave it up to your collective imaginations.

EDIT: Here are a few photos from my first day in DC

A prime example of lush DC front gardens :

A pair of foxes at the Natural History Museum:

Any my favorite, the bull elephant in the front hall:

D.C. Bound!

So BIG NEWS here at the Worcester outpost. It turns out that the NPR internship that I applied for back in July, that I didn't get... well, I got it. Someone had to cancel at the last minute, and they called me up (why is it I am never anyone's first choice?). So I've spent the last two days frantically planning my trip down there, searching for housing, and in general freaking out about my move to the Big City.

I've been keeping the phone lines open to the Montana Headquarters, staying in touch with M&D while I figure all this out. My father is always full of such sage advice. This morning, he reassured me with the following:

"You know, Annika, all these things always seem bigger than they really are. You're just going to DC. A lot of other girls your age"--here I thought he would say something like dating dead-ends, or working at McDonalds, things to make me seem awesome by comparison for having ventured into the wide world--"are packing to go to bootcamp and getting deployed to Iraq."

Oh. Well great, Dad, how can I follow that act? I thought a lot of other girls my age were getting jobs and internships and trying to figure out where they belong in the world, too. Now my brain is just overrun with images of me landing in fatigues and dust on a wide avenue of downtown DC, fresh from the helicopter. Cut to a scene of me crouching behind a pile of construction debris eating rations out of a can, a look of war-weariness on my dirt-smeared face. Of course there will be the requisite reading of letters from home and lovelorn notes from my beau. Insert sweeping Michael Bay music and machine gun noises here.

Dad's parting words were much more reassuring: "You'll be fine, just stay away from congressman."

Dundun, dundun *ominous music*

So, according to BBC science news, which I happened to be skimming this morning, four great white sharks were tagged this weekend just off of Cape Cod. And guess where I just sent my uncle for an end of summer vacation... They announced the beaches will be closed for the rest of the weekend, and I instantly had flashes of a disasterously short-sighted mayor talking to chief Brody and striped swimtrunks and gnawed limbs. Although, I like to think that New Englander (New English?) sharks might be more well-mannered. Or, on second thought, if they are Red Sox fans, they're probably all tools.