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.