Thursday, July 22, 2010

Peace Corps on the Hill

A favorite quote I've rediscovered:
"Silly is you in a natural state, and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again!"

Random thoughts:
- It's a cool feeling to figure out the reason people seem to be staring and smiling at you more is because you forgot to take your badge off upon leaving the office.
- Life is not about economizing everything - while some things work better when you pursue efficiency, others are equally as valuable when you proceed with leisure or with morality.
- If you resort to violence to get things done, that is what children learn and they see violence as an acceptable means to your end goal.
- Good intentions do not necessarily translate to good policy.

Quote from my shape personality quiz obsessed office: "I don't think I've ever met a triangle before!" If you're interested in the quiz (is actually quite entertaining and pretty accurate), here's the link: http://www.psychometricshapes.co.uk/questionnaire.php

Upon hopping out of a couple taxis with Alyson and a few other Peace Corps interns volunteering to set up and clean up for the Peace Corps' Congressional intern event:

The Supreme Court.

The Capitol Visitors' Entrance.


My issue was that basically I stress out about going through security. I don't want to get yelled at, set off any detectors, have my bag searched etc. I know security is necessary, but I swear I'm not going to hurt anybody! Way back when, there was a stretch in my life where my bag got plucked from the xray belt for "random searches" at the airport six flights in a row! Not cool. Anyways, the invitation for the event said no food or drink, but nowhere did it say you couldn't even bring a water bottle... So I was instructed to walk outside to throw away my water bottle with a built-in filter that I was planning to bring to China. Meanwhile, everything else I had sent through the xray machine was being inspected, and when I returned, the security officer asked me what the huge black box I was in charge of contained. Already flustered, I learned apparently should have asked Alyson what that piece of luggage was... My best guess was a projector screen, which actually was not far off - the officer asked me to open the case, which I did after fumbling around for a few minutes, and we discovered that it was a bunch of poster screens. Ok cool, can I go now? I caught up with the rest of my group, water-bottle-less and wheeling the silly black case behind me.

Tunneling under the Capitol for visitors' events.




So in and outside the South Congressional Meeting Room, I got to unleash some of my creative as well as slightly OCD tendencies. My fellow interns and I set up tables outside the room to greet the interns with Peace Corps info, recruiting materials, and awesome posters.




Inside the room itself, we strategically placed posters, set up the table and podium behind which the Director and members of Congress would speak, and put a stack of free recruiting materials as well as a cute little flag from one of the Peace Corps' host countries on each chair for the interns. We also got to make the little gift bags for each speaker! Small delights of being behind the scenes.





A few pics of pre-event nerdiness:




And then the Director of Peace Corps came and posed with the board we set up! Not for me, but I took a creeper photo...


The excitement began as the interns milled about looking at our displays and then were ushered into the room for an incredible video about Peace Corps experiences. With the seats completely filled and listeners also four rows deep in the back of the room, the Director as well as four out of the six members of Congress who are Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) spoke to all of us. In case you're wondering who, Driehaus, Garamendi, Honda, and Petri all told a couple tales of their experiences and wisdom. My favorite was Congressman Honda - he's adorable! Now I've been lucky to hear tons of RPCV stories, but it was truly incredible to hear how these people's worldviews were developed through Peace Corps and how that outlook helps them serve people.

Some main points I took away:
- Congress recently approved all of the funding Peace Corps asked for - "Peace Corps as foreign policy has the best return on your investment."
- A profound attitude shift in the government's foreign policy: Peace Corps is the best tool of soft foreign policy.
- Empowerment.
- When you spend a significant time abroad, you have to remember that the US and its people haven't changed their perspective even though you have. (This will be good for me to remember upon my return from China in the winter!)

Some photos from the speeches:























As the event came to a close, the interns once again bustled about, ignored our grumbling stomachs, and put back the room how we found it. And perhaps some recruiting materials made it into our own personal belongings as well... Perks! And as we were just about to head back to HQ, Alyson asked if we'd mind waiting with all the equipment for a few while she gave the new Peace Corps recruiters a quick tour of the Capitol. We all said that was fine, and as they were taking off, we all looked at each other and wondered who had been on a Capitol tour before. Discovering that only one of us had, we made please and thanks and left the one with the equipment while we dashed after Alyson and the recruiters to see if we could tag along. Thankfully that was ok!

I did not even expect to have enough time in my DC schedule to do a capitol tour, but now I was lucky enough to jump in with this group, bypass all the lines with Alyson's Capitol staff badge, and wander throughout this beautiful building, stopping in my tracks in picture-taking awe and surely getting in everybody else's way. Maybe I got caught up in the details of each room, but the dome itself really snuck up on me! It seems as though as you just go from incredible room to incredible room and then all of a sudden you walk through another archway, looking straight ahead as normal, but when you look up it stretches for ages! Layers upon layers of intricate designs of each story up to the painting inside the dome itself. All I could do was stare. Just like the Boy Scout group that was roaming the capitol at a similar pace funny enough. Photos to follow.










Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Trying new things

Yesterday was my first attempt at a typical DC trend: Happy Hour. Now I'm 20, so don't worry, I'm allowed to go to Happy Hours for the food! My friend Kate and I have been playing email-tag to line up our schedules for Happy Hour food while we're both still in DC. She also latched on to the fact that I had never tried sushi before, and we made a Tuesday 5:15 plan to meet up at Current Sushi by Dupont Circle. What a swanky place! A very cool atmosphere with dark, sleek furniture. She grabbed us a seat at the bar, another first for me, and I proceeded to order a nice, cool water on the rocks while I got counseled on all of the options on the Happy Hour menu. I had never tried sushi before, mostly because 1) only in the last couple of years have I started liking fish, and the idea of raw fish always weirded me out and 2) when it comes to food, I'm a texture person, so I couldn't imagine being ok with anything slimy... But, I have heard an incredible amount of people gush over sushi here, and as I figured it would probably be better to try something on a coast than in Minnesota, I had vowed to try it before I left. Mission accomplished, and I was quite pleased! After our incipient dish, despite discovering a tiny white worm inside an edamame pod and learning that had we ingested the worm it would have been healthy, we were game to forge on with the rest of the plates coming to us. Shrimp and vegetable wontons were piping hot so in my impatience I might have burned my mouth slightly, but they were good enough to add to my list of things I want to learn to cook. On to the actual sushi. Oh, and might I add, since I had failed miserably in my only chopstick lesson from my dear roommate Jessie, this was a little nerve-wracking on the outset, but I actually managed to make my hands work right for the most part and didn't look like too much of a white girl foreigner to sushi (I hope!). In taste-testing salmon and avocado rolls, spicy tuna rolls, and nigiri eel there wasn't a one I disliked! And surprisingly the one I was most apprehensive about because of the whole texture deal ended up being my favorite. The eel was quite sweet and not at all slimy. Another item crossed off the list.

Today I got the opportunity to see more of DC through work, which was pretty awesome. Alyson, the woman I met who works in the Peace Corps' Congressional Relations Office and happens to be from my hometown, asked for interns to volunteer to pass out flyers to congressional offices to publicize our event on the Hill tomorrow. My supervisor has been really great about me getting to experience everything Peace Corps and DC have to offer kindly agreed to my volunteering to help publicize today and also to do setup and cleanup tomorrow (and attend the event!). So I get to do some behind-the-scenes work as well as attend with other interns and staff in the Congressional Visitors' Center the speeches by the Peace Corps director and the six members of Congress who are Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. Today's adventure was traveling in a pack with Alyson and four other interns to Union Station (the closest yet still not-so-close metro stop to the Capitol) and divvying up flyers in Senate Office Buildings Hart and Russell to give to all the Senate offices demarcated by huge flags outside the doors. The two buildings shared the typical majestic DC architecture on the outside, but the flavor of the buildings once you stepped within was quite different. Hart is very open and spacious, but feels a little stark with white walls and lots of transparent glass. Russell, on the other hand, was characterized by beautiful, tall, dark wood doors to all the offices as well as plush carpeting to offset the white walls. Splitting up floors, we tackled the buildings in much less time than expected and will hopefully (or not) see some of the very gracious and/or some of the somewhat snarky Hill interns at our event tomorrow!

Unfortunately I did not document in photos my sushi experience yesterday, but I figured I'd take a picture of my cute mini-cube at work, especially before my team's imminent move down to the 5th floor. Never did get around to decorating...


"The Senate is the living symbol of our union of states."


Union Station - my first time here also, but it is bustling! Part train station, part shopping mall, part metro station, all beautiful.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Peru Exhibit Videos

Sorry these videos are so scratchy and shaky! I was taking them with my little camera and just loved the music and the spontaneous dancing!



Sunday, July 18, 2010

Working on the checklist

Unhappily arising this Saturday morning at the same I have to for work on weekdays, nevertheless once I convinced my heavy eyelids to stay open for longer than a couple seconds I was quite excited. After walking the twenty minutes across the Key Bridge, enjoying the breeze from both the zipping highway traffic and the serene Potomac, and getting off the metro what I now know was a stop too early, I rounded the block (aka huge complex on which the White House sits), speedwalking to find the Southeast Gate and the tour group from TFAS. Unfortunately all we could bring to our White House tour was a wallet and phone, so alas the only pictures I was able to take were outside the White House and still in my phone with a bleak chance of making it out... So after waiting in line with our group for a good 20 minutes, we went through all the security procedures and were finally liberated to take the tour at our own pace. It was really cool to walk through the hallways lined with photos of presidents with their families and pets as well as other famous people. The tour unfortunately only takes you through a few rooms, but a few of us had a couple great conversations with the security guards who are trained in an incredible amount of White House and presidential factoids that entertained us as we watched employees converting the press room into a stage for another event. My favorite part was walking through the Green Room and then the Red Room and peering out of the window to what basically was the White House porch. It was a straight shot through the huge bay windows onto the Lawn, the fountain, and then the Jefferson Memorial off into the distance.

Following the tour I went with a couple of new friends from my program with whom I basically did the whole tour, one from Vietnam and the other from China (who coincidentally is studying at the University of Minnesota of all places for their journalism program!), to the most touristy place I've been in DC - the White House Gift Shop down the street, where we had our pictures taken in front of an Oval Office replica desk with cardboard Barack and Michelle Obama. On our way to the metro, we heard drumming in the distance, and curious people, we wanted to check it out. It came from a park a couple blocks away, where we discovered a percussion group called Batala: an all-female group created to empower women through drumming! These women were super into it, and what a sweet concept! I love all the random but cool things you find and hear about living in a city like this.

A walk home from the Rosslyn metro brought me back to Georgetown in time to be picked up by a couple of Carleton friends: Will, here working at the Natural History Museum this summer, and his girlfriend Nina who lives in Maryland. They drove all the way up to have lunch with me - so sweet! It was great to see some familiar faces and to explore a little bit more of Georgetown as well. Though admittedly I had no clue how to get places in a car, we ended up parking and indecisively wandering until we found a cute little Italian place. Upon entering I was skeptical as the restaurant was completely empty at lunchtime on a Saturday... but it was small and had reasonable prices, which were made even more reasonable by the fact that my meatball calzone became lunch and dinner! Thank you to the societal acceptableness of doggy bags.

A third, but not last trip out of Georgetown University this day led Tschuna and I on my second walk to Rosslyn Station: this time to meet our co-intern Brittney at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. This was my second time to the museum, but this time we planned ahead and booked tickets to the main exhibit. Directional confusion got us starting our tour time a little bit late, and we had to canvass the museum in the hour and a half (they say it normally takes two hours) before the museum closed. This was another extremely well done museum. I believe people could spend an entire day there, just reading everything. What initially weirded me out was that we started the tour at basically the same pace as a family with three children under the age of seven. I kept thinking they are way too young for all of this. But listening to their questions and their mother's sensible and reasoned answers, coupled with the museum's evidence that Hitler focused so heavily on indoctrinating the young of the German population, led me to shift my thinking that in order to prevent this history from repeating itself we need to start young as well. Our job should be to teach children about love and awareness.

A few things I found especially intriguing:
- Propaganda: "Buy only at German shops." The Jews were Germans too. Until laws passed at Nuremburg declared they weren't.
- Public humiliation was used as a tool against "racial degradation."
- Forced sterilization is not something you hear about in history class.
- Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps as well on religious grounds. But because they were apparently not the scourge of humanity, they were given the opportunity to be freed if they recanted their beliefs. Not a single one did.

It was incredibly powerful, and the main thing Tschuna and I talked about afterwards is the horror and cynicism that arose because of the context of today's world. We keep saying "Never again." And yet genocide has happened and has been allowed to happen by people and politicians who feel powerless, or think it's not their problem, or simply don't want to get involved because it's too messy.

On our way home our relief from the heat was twofold as we paused to savor the breeze from escalators and trains and ending up on an uncrowded metro, even got to put our feet up for a few stops! Yet Tschuna and I pretty much turned right around after returning to our apartments and set out on another walk, this time to the grocery store, and at last our final expedition for the night. We found some yummy food, put it away in our respective fridges, and then chilled out with Under the Tuscan Sun (which I had never seen and only served to fan the flame of my desire to travel the world!). A ton of walking yesterday, but thankfully my feet don't hurt, my legs don't hurt - I was not tired, just sleepy.


Being perpetually tired was just kind of a fact for this weekend, as it seemed most reasonable to get up at a decent hour and get a move on the day. For Sunday food exploration, Tschuna's and my place of choice was Johnny Rockets: America's Original Hamburger. As we decided to go for kind of a late breakfast, and in light of the fact that Tschuna is a vegetarian, neither of us opted to sample this origial burger (though I did end up with the "Patty and Eggs," a yummy breakfast combo). Each table had a cute little jukebox, although we could not get ours to work unfortunately... Quintessential posters were a must as well. Then we set about on M Street errands and shopping: Tschuna procured postcards, and then we headed to the Shops at Georgetown Park at 11:55 in perfect timing as we discovered shops did not open until noon. We checked out a few sales, quickly headed back to Georgetown as I found myself in a pickle with dead-asleep roommates and keys mistakenly let on my desk. Thankfully my roommate Rezina later told me she could let me in when I got back. The familiar walk to Rosslyn was next on the agenda, as the metro would take us to the American Indian museum for my second time: this adventure to experience the week-long exhibit on Peruvian culture. I was surprised at the crowd size! It was really amazing to see that many people turn up. This event was truly awesome. A band playing traditional music. People in traditional dress selling their incredible wares from blankets to fuzzy stuffed animals, from hand-woven hats of the finest texture that take a month each to make to jewelry and knit ornaments. What beautiful people with rich cultural history! I just loved the vibrant colors, the spontaneous dancing, and the smiling faces!

More pictures in my Picasa album, but here are a few of my favorites:















Last on the list before heading home was a trip through the Botanical Garden quite close to the American Indian Museum to take more flower pics for my momma! Again, more on Picasa!







The last adventure for the weekend was a World Team Tennis match, for which I was quite excited! In an intimate setting of a stadium in the middle of downtown, the Washington Kastles were to take on the Boston Lobsters. I had found tickets over half off through Groupon, unfortunately neither of the Williams sisters ended up playing like I had advertised to entice my roommate Rezina to join me, but we still had fun! The scoring was a little crazy, and the main gist of Rezina's thoughts were "Wow, tennis is complicated." It was definitely fun to hear a complete outsider's view of the sport I have been immersed in since I was young, and even funnier to hear her comments about the spaziness of players that don't exactly have the concept of mental toughness down pat. It was really cool to be out in the fresh air watching some really cool pro tennis players in the middle of downtown DC, dance in our seats to the awesome music, and to get free tshirts! Aka pjs because they're size large. Definitely worth it.

Following the trend, here are a few fave photos with more on Picasa!







Another crazy-busy weekend completed, one last weekend in DC to go. Thanks again for sticking it out with me, and I hope you are having fun as well wherever you are!

Love,
Kathryn