Most important information first: I just ate the last of the awesome biscuits* I bought from Wholefoods the other day. This is a sad day indeed for biscuit** fans worldwide. Until I go back to Wholefoods to buy more, that is. But who knows when that will be?
Anyway yes. I am home early from the National Museum of American History, which is what I did today instead of going to work. Due to a forgotten purse this involved a very long walk in sandals which means that now my legs hurt. I was in sandals in the first place because the shoes I wore on my first day have effectively eaten my heels (not as much of an exaggeration as I am usually prone to). I forgot my purse because yesterday my water bottle leaked all over my bag (including my visa paperwork) and I had to dry it out. As you can see, things are going well. Actually, that is unfounded sarcasm. Being here is great, even if I am already exhausted and just want to curl up in a ball and sleep for a day to sort myself out. It's not Washington's fault that I'm a disaster.
I held off on blogging for this long because I wanted to have photos to put up when I started talking about Washington DC. Unfortunately, I work on a military installation and my photography skills are special needs at best, so all of them are both irrelevant and rubbish. Let's not let that stop us, though.
Erm. Where to begin. OK, well for the next two months I live here:
This is the International Student House. Inside, it is basically more Oxford than Oxford. Here is my (wood-panelled!) room (it's actually a quarter of a room):
I share with three other people, all of whom have a similar set-up going on. They are all very nice and the set-up means that the privacy loss isn't too bad, although one of them did turn the air conditioning off last night which made for a rather sticky wake-up this morning.
Speaking of, the weather here ranges from bearable to horrific. When I arrived, it was 95 degrees (that's 35 in real weather) and humid as hell; this persists long after the sun goes down and didn't even shift after the big thunderstorm on Monday afternoon. Luckily, yesterday was cooler and it's now somewhere in the 80s (high 20s) and a bit breezy, making it really rather pleasant in the shade and not too awful in the sun either. Weather gets discussed a lot here, mostly in an "oh god how are we still alive" sort of way, but I'm glad that the hell of Sunday and Monday isn't *that* normal.
In order to work, I must take the Metro, which is a couple of blocks away from the house. here are some facts about the Washington Metro:
1) The system is potentially pretty good.
2) All the stations are big and identical and industrial looking and are probably built with nuclear fallout in mind.
3) D.C. trains don't have sensors which check to see if you're in the door or not. Well, they do, but they're sadistic sensors which only open under great sufferance. Trains leave a minute after they've got into the station and if you're only halfway in the train at that point that is your own damn problem.
4) The tickets have pandas printed on the front and escalator safety tips printed on the back. I thought the escalator safety tips were hilarious until I discovered that people actually used to regularly die on Metro escalators 'cause they didn't have those big red safety buttons until recently.
5) The trains are late sometimes and it is infuriating.
6) Crazy people sometimes ride. And talk. Nobody else talks, only the crazy people.
Here is a picture of Dupont Circle, the stop close to my home, courtesy of Wikimedia commons:
When I have ridden the metro sufficiently and arrived at the Navy Yard stop, I then have a ten minute walk down to the gates of the navy yard, where I get to chat to the security guard, show the A5 piece of paper with permanent marker scrawls that counts as my pass (apparently the machine that makes real passes broke in January and they don't intend to fix it. The bureaucracy here defies belief. And I say that having lived in CHINA for crying out loud). For my first couple of days, I have been working in the back of the Navy Yard Museum:
The museum itself is all perfectly nice and well presented, and thus reminds me of the ancient capital museum in Anyang, China- one of the best museums I ever went to (i.e. well captioned and full of human sacrifices), languishing in one of the least touristy parts of the country. I mean, who honestly puts the naval base on their list of things to see in Washington? And the visitor entrance is in the most far-flung bit of the base! It's crazy. But I digress. This museum is cool, if a bit out of the way. And I work in an office which looks like you would expect an office to look, except everything is all very informal and most people who work there are also unpaid interns so the work ethic is much less stressful than it might otherwise be.
So. My job. I am presently employed in researching and then writing about the burning of the Navy Yard in 1814, when the British invaded and burned down most of the capital. The Navy Yard itself was actually burned by the Americans first to stop it falling into enemy hands, and the story of how it got burned down is quite exciting and melodramatic so that's what's going to be turned into a pyrotechnic extravaganza by yours truly. It's only going to be half an hour long, which is a mild disappointment as I could otherwise have spent a lot of time exploring the build up and particularly talking about William Jones, the secretary of the navy, whose job basically involves writing endless terse letters to ship captains telling them what they should be doing. Love you Will. But no, Jones probably won't make an appearance in this- instead, I shall be dealing with Thomas Tingey, the burner, and Mordecai Booth, his clerk, who has a pub named after him and who may find himself written with serious homosexual undertones for no reason other than that I can. Translating the events into an interesting play which isn't just half an hour of "OOOH BURNING AAAH AAAH" will be a challenge... but love will find a way.
Ooh, and I am also going to be involved in bringing in acting companies and all that jazz too, which will hopefully be exciting without tapping into my undying hatred of auditions. And then once I'm done with this, I will be writing what my boss keeps referring to as a "Punch and Judy show" about the build-up, which will be comedic and involve puppets and hopefully the reading of lots more entertaining letters and most importantly WILLIAM JONES. and that is what I have to do. It's... well, I should be more fired up about it than I currently am, but to be fair I am tired and I've only been at it for two slightly disorganised days. And also the above paragraph probably indicates that I am way more fired up about it than I think I am.
When I am not busy being employed, I am hanging out back in the house. At present, being here is like being in a souped-up freshers' week, where all conversations revolve around the holy question trinity of "What's your name- where do you come from- what do you do". The difference here is that the answers are actually interesting, but it's still a bit tiring. Luckily I am getting past that stage with people now, and hopefully my jet lag is going to be worn off enough to do some genuine socialising tonight. I tried to play football yesterday but the Blisters of Death precluded it. Oh, and the food is pretty nice. I have eaten more fruit in the past three days than in the last year put together, mostly blueberries because blueberries are the food of the GODS. Epic love for these things, especially the slightly underripe ones.
The final thing which I must write about or the world will implode is my day at the American History Museum. When we were walking in, I had a conversation with one of the girls I went with which went like this:
Person: So... this is going to be a stupid question, but...
AJ: Fire away (I did just ask you which building was the Capitol, I'm stupid too)
Person: So we've been around a few hundred years, and we teach all our history in grade school, and everybody sort of knows it, but you British have been around for AGES- how do you learn it all?
AJ: ... well.
AJ: ... well.
(Answer I gave was actually "We don't care about most of it." Which is true. How much do you know about pre Tudor British history that isn't either the Romans or 1066?*** Exactly.)
With this in mind, I was intrigued to see how America manages to fill a very large museum with its own history. This is done very simply, actually, by defining EVERYTHING that happened in the past as history. Michelle Obama's 2009 inauguration dress is in there. So are costumes from the Lion King musical. So is Bill Clinton's saxophone. I think there was also some Iraq war memorabilia in there somewhere, although I skimmed most of the war bits after the Civil War. There is also a very large section (i.e. a FLOOR) devoted to science and particularly the link between invention and toys, which I would happily have spent hours in if there weren't so many kids hanging around and ruining it. Most of it was awesome though, especially the transportation section (cars! trams! Other things!) and the lady teaching nonviolence stuff outside the Greensboro sit-in bench. I lost my two companions right at the very beginning and never found them again (well... never looked either) so after getting bored at around 2.30, I wander out into the National Mall to take some generic Washington photos.
Generic Washington photos:
A statue of George which allegedly made children cry when it was unveiled.
War memorial. Sign prohibits any sort of nice activity that could be had with fountains.
The American dream in 3 easy steps.
It's the White House! With an oddly familiar bus in front...
And that is what has happened thus far. There is other rubbish going around in my head about language and bureaucracy and other mini exciting things about the city, but this is long enough for now and I would quite like to play the piano before dinner, if nobody else is down there. It's a rather nice grand and everybody else who plays it appears to be a super awesome classical virtuoso, so I'm perversely enjoying subjecting it to Eurythmics and Elliott Smith chords and half written Adrienne-songs.
*Cookies
**Cookie
*** Question does not apply to historians. Shush.
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