Bye America (A day in rainy DC)

Another airport, another blog post.  This time I’m in DC, waiting to fly out to Tbilisi by way of Munich.  It’s Friday night.  I’ll arrive in Tbilisi on Sunday morning.  I know you’re already jealous.

I flew into DC yesterday and had a short orientation with American Councils and the four other brave souls going on the Eurasian Intensive Language Program.  It was really interesting getting to know these people who will be experiencing similar and yet very different things over the course of the summer. We’re all going to our own chosen post-Soviet country: Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Georgia (clearly the best!), and we all come with vast but varied experience.  Our pursuit of graduate degrees and interest in these countries that fly below most people’s radar made it easy to connect for the brief period we were together.  It was a taste of what I hope is to come; in Georgia, befriending other expats was far easier than making friends ever is.  Seriously.  Where else does the line “Hey there, fellow native English speaker,” actually serve as a great introduction?

I had the afternoon off.  Everyone else had earlier flights so we were given lunch to go and they shipped off.  As DC has been enjoying a nice spate of rainstorms care of Andrea, I decided to forgo another venture up Old Abe’s steps and hit the Smithsonian.  Since I definitely did not pack an umbrella and shunned the multiple offers, I looked like a bedraggled rat by the time I got there.  It was not a problem, since I had left Foggy Bottom, where the hotel and GWU are, and far too many well-dressed young people milled around, all of them carrying umbrellas like sensible people.  Umbrellas and ponchos abounded on the National Mall, but here they were carried by tourists in flip flops, hats signifying their tour group, and t-shirts from high schools and colleges across the nation.  There were plenty of teenagers clearly trying to be cool but failing in a way they will only see when they look back on these photos in several years.  This made me appreciate that I have no idea where pictures of my 6^th grade trip to DC (basically just the Smithsonian) are hiding.

DC, and especially the National Mall, with tour buses waiting on all available streets and people milling around even in the rain, provided some excellent people watching.  As I’m gearing up my traveler’s skills of observation and analysis, it was fun to turn a critical eye on my fellow countrymen, to try to view Americans a little like I view Georgians.

I was actually left with a pleasant picture.  After seeing hundreds of benches to eat lunch, which promised a soaked dress for sure, I was very relieved to find an empty event tent with a few chairs where I could sit down after strolling the American History Museum and finally eat my lunch.  About halfway through, I thought my little piece of heaven was about to be destroyed when an event truck rolled up.  The man smiled and quickly brought out a table!  His friend teased him that he had never seen him work so fast before, to which he replied that I was cute and his friend was not.  A compliment and a dry table!  Between that and watching cute kids try to take pictures in front of the Capitol, I was quite pleased with my countrymen.

Obviously not the Capitol.  It makes me sad the Washington Monument is STILL encased in scaffolding.

I hurried through parts of the National Gallery, finding Van Dycks, Rembrandts, and Titans lurking just around the corner.  Wishing I could stay, I headed back to my fancy hotel in the swanky part of the city.  I’m not sure if it was cocktail hour, their normal MO, or what, but in the lobby they were giving away free mojitos, so I grabbed my bags and a drink and waited for my shuttle.

Since my program arranged for me to arrive 4 hours early, I had plenty of time to do everything I needed at Dulles, including eating Mexican as my last American meal in 2 months.  DC gets definite props for having free wifi in both airports, even if they do charge an extra dollar each way (each way!!) for paper tickets on the metro.

Goodbye America!  I’ll see you in August.  If you could improve the weather by then, I’d really appreciate it.