A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of going on a "Monuments by Moonlight" trolley tour with a pretty awesome aunt and uncle (p.s. thanks, awesome aunt and uncle!). I spent the night playing with camera settings, trying to let the right amount of light reach the sensor while maintaining a decent amount of clarity (difficult at night without a tripod, but not terrible with image stabilization).

So here, for your viewing pleasure: a brief photographic tour of DC's monuments at night.

After a scant two months of sending me movies (to my mailbox! For viewing at my leisure! What is this madness?) Netflix has compiled a list of the kinds of films I like to watch:

"Movies you'll love!" It says. "Your Taste Preferences created these rows."

My taste preferences claim that I like:

Critically-acclaimed Cerebral Independent Movies
Dramas starring Toshirô Mifune
Visually-striking Dark Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Mind-bending Foreign Documentaries

Erm, Netflix has discovered that I am a huge, huge geek.

It then suggests films I might enjoy: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Children Of Heaven, An Inconvenient Truth, Blade Runner (Final Cut), Seven Samurai, Good Night and Good Luck.

Dear Netflix: it's true - you've found me out; I am a geek of the first caliber and don't I know it. But here's my question for you: shouldn't you be encouraging me to branch out a little bit, rather than just feeding me more of the same? Don't you have some responsibility to, I don't know, harness the power of television to fry my geeky brain around the edges just a bit? Because really - you think O Brother, Where Art Thou? is going to make me lighten up and live a little? There's a word for what I'm feeling right now: it starts with an S and rhymes with 'schleptical'.

On a brighter note, under "Local Favorites for Washington, District of Columbia" you can find such gems as National Geographic: Guns, Germs and Steel, three seasons of The West Wing, and Ken Burns' The Civil War.

At least I'm in good company?

I recently uploaded nearly a thousand pictures from my camera and realized that I had neglected to post about a number of my exploratory adventures during my first weeks here in DC. These photos were taken during the second weekend in September, on King Street in Alexandria, Virginia, where there was an enormous and very lively art fair which stretched down to the end of the street to the (Potomac) river.


When I had finished browsing one side of the art fair, I took a walk down by the waterfront. It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and there were people everywhere, musicians playing on the sidewalk, and, of course, pigeons. I made sure to get you a nice shot of the pigeons.



I walked back to the metro (about a mile and a half) along the other side of the art fair, so I could at least catch a glimpse of everything on display. (My favorite stall of the day was a gallery of jewelry made out of old watch parts!)

And in case you were worried, I also made sure to take in some historic buildings with arches and columns.


And all of this was really easy to access by Metro - my love affair with DC public transportation has yet to die. All in all, it was a fantastic day!

One of the things I missed when I was in college was going apple-picking. I know there were orchards within driving distance of Providence, but I never had a car - and between classes, my job, and rugby, there just never seemed to be any time to hop a bus or find friends to go adventuring with.

But I'm from apple-town (Barack Obama gave not one, but two speeches from our orchards on the campaign trail), and whether or not I get to pick them from the tree myself, I can taste the difference between fresh local apples and imported ones. And the autumn (my favorite season) just never seems the same without being surrounded by bushels and pecks of my go-to fall fruit.

So imagine how delighted I was to find this:


Farmers from West Virginia come to DC every weekend to sell their produce outside of Eastern Market, and while I can't vouch for the peaches (too late in the season) I can tell you that the apples are mind-bendingly good. I've been living off bags of Honeycrisps as big as two fists, interspersed with crunchy little Galas and the occasional Jonamac. My lunch bag every day is decidedly lumpy and harder to fit in my purse on the way to work. I have been known to munch through an apple at lunch and go back for another one in the evening when I get home.


I don't live in apple-town anymore - but I'm liking this one just fine. :)

I don't have to tell you in great detail what I did today.

I can just show you this:

and I think you'll understand.

(If you search for libraries near my apartment on google maps, three of the top ten are the Folger Shakespeare Library, the US Supreme Court Library, and the Library of Congress. Awesome much?)

One of the first things I did when I landed into DC was to find the local paint store and walk there. It turns out there's a delightful little community hardware store/paint shop less than a mile from my house called Frager's, which, besides being locally owned, narrow-aisled and awesome, also turned out to be full of knowledgeable paint salespeople ready to assist me with all of my color-choosing needs.

Sadly for them, I was entirely devoid of color-choosing needs. There may have been a vast array of tiny paint chips to peruse, but I knew exactly what I wanted. And lucky for me, Frager's carried just the color I had in mind, the one I've been wanting to paint my bedroom with for years now.

It looks like this:


But, surely! - you protest - there must be some mistake. You didn't really paint your room the color of Kermit the Frog, did you?



Oops?




Of course, the room is so small, it's practically begging for cheerfully-hued walls. And lest you think lime green paint is tacky and prevents the room from achieving any semblance of aesthetic panache, I submit to you the following:


- as proof that once in a while, you can paint the town a different color, and still go just as wild.

Today was full of surprises. After a long week (ok, actually a short week, but it felt long), I slept in and went for a long run when I woke up, expecting that, with the tourist numbers down, my route down Independence Avenue to the US Capitol and down the Mall to the Washington Monument would be uneventful and quiet.

Then I (literally) ran into this.

I'm a big fan of the right to free speech, so I mostly ducked through the crowd, browsing signs and wishing I had my camera with me. There were thousands gathered on the back lawn of the Capitol and the front half of the Mall, and then there was a NCNW Black Family Reunion taking place on the back half of the Mall, complete with a step competition, so all was chaos and madness, which I am now coming to expect whenever I leave my house. Chaos and madness, in my experience, is delightful, especially when it's well regulated and involves hordes of clueless tourists riding the metro.

The one thing that did bother me about the demonstrators, actually, was the amount of cigarette smoking. I will confess a bias here, since there's nothing worse than having secondhand smoke blown in your face while running - impossible to hold your breath for too long, and impossible to breathe the stuff when you need the oxygen to move. And it got me thinking, since the demonstration was mostly about health care: when about two-thirds of a crowd of protesters are either overweight or obese (this is representative of the national population) and nearly a quarter are smokers (also representative) - you think we maybe have bigger problems with health care in America than our legislation? No matter what side of the aisle you're on, or even if you have no opinions of proposed health care reforms, I think a number of things are going to have to change if we want to even come close to other industrialized countries in our level of spending on health care (we spend a far greater percentage of our GDP than anyone else), quality of health care, and distribution of coverage.

It's always nice when people at national publications agree with me, so for your perusal, here's a recent Op-Ed from the NY Times, discussing the potential impact of new health care legislation on the way we approach public health.

On a lighter note, I spent the afternoon wandering Eastern Market, a historic indoor marketplace about a mile from my house, which on weekends also is home to an outdoor flea market, with tables of fresh local fruits and salsas, lots of handmade jewelry and clothing, and various local artists selling their work. And (finally) I have some pictures to show for it!

The Market. The sky was a bit overcast - not a great outdoor photography day.

I played with my new camera for a while, sorting out the right settings for different pictures (below: Fun with Aperture).


You can sample most of the fresh produce being sold outside the market, which of course I did on my way out. Thanks to delicious free slices of apples and peaches, I discovered (and subsequently bought) a bag full of Honeycrisps and a single yellow peach.

Wandering away from the market, down 7th St., I couldn't help but notice a white A-frame sign on the sidewalk. In wide block letters, it read: BOOKS -->.

I may have a soft spot for new apples, but I have an even softer one for BOOKS -->. Investigation ensued immediately.

Following the sign, I pushed open a dirty glass door and entered to find myself suddenly and violently surrounded by giant stacks of used books. There were classic leatherbound editions of Chaucer priced at over $200, battered Danielle Steele paperbacks selling for pocket change, and just about everything else you can imagine in between. And when I say "in between", I mean that the entire store was filled, floor to ceiling, with so many books there was barely enough room for the customers.


As if the whole thing could get any better, a wiry little man with a shock of white hair looked up from his desk (buried in stacks of manuscripts) and rasped, in a not-unkind sort of growl: "Hello, there. Today is second Saturday, so everything in the store is ten percent off, and there's free wine and cheese to your left." He jabbed an elbow to the left, where there was a table squeezed in amongst the books, complete with three different kinds of wine, and paper plates of cheese and crackers.

Needless to say, I was enamored of the place with no further ado.

A glass of Chardonnay and an hour later, I left with a paperback copy of All's Well that Ends Well and a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who's one of my favorite writers. The total came out to $7.00, plus tax, and the grizzly old man winked at me as he wrote out the receipt by hand.

It was good wine, too!

So there you have it. I collided with a protest, ate free slices of fruit until my fingers were sticky, and then made out like a bandit in a shop with books enough to make me want to move in, permanently.

Yeah, I'd say that's a pretty good day.

If I have been delinquent in my blogging, it's mostly because I've been putting together my living space, which has been quite the process. Thanks to IKEA and a fantastic little neighborhood hardware/paint store, I now have a bright green, book-filled, fully alphabetized bedroom and two clean bathrooms, and my housemates and I are coordinating on how to handle our living room, kitchen, and front and back yards, both of which have grown into tiny jungles thanks to a year of almost no maintenance. That, and I'm still trying to find time to upload all of the photos on my new camera (my laptop is 4 years old and can't handle so many high-resolution pictures at once).

But! That's no reason to withhold stories.

Two weekends ago, my friend Joey and I lined up several hours early outside of the Shakespeare Theater Company in order to land free tickets for the evening's show. Free! No other word makes a twenty-two-year-old's heart sing so loud. Free Shakespeare is worth standing in line for, and since the box office opened two hours before the show, Joey and I planned to wait for a while, secure ourselves a pair of tickets, grab a bite to eat, and then enjoy the show.

We didn't plan to get pepper-sprayed. But we know how the best-laid schemes gang aft (hint: agley).

After waiting in line for about an hour, quite pleasantly since staff were handing out playbills that had a Taming-of-the-Shrew word search on the back (hurrah!), I turned to say something to Joey and was cut off, mid-sentence, by a coughing fit that never seemed to end. It was a hacking cough - it felt like something was caught in my throat or my lungs, something spicy and buzzing and interminable. Joey was also choking on it, and I looked up to see every other person on the block coughing, gagging, and tearing up, until we all pulled our shirts up over our noses.

The cacophony faded. People looked around, still breathing through t-shirts and scarves, wiping streaming eyes and gasping: "What was that?" No one seemed to know for sure. I looked at Joey; Joey looked at me; the people in front and back of us looked at each other, and we realized it had to have been pepper spray. Nothing else leaves that nice peppery feeling in the back of your throat to choke on every now and then.

None of us ever did figure out who was spraying the stuff, or why, or how it drifted to our block, but there you have it. I came, I saw, I was sprayed in the face. Oh, DC. Let's be friends?

(The Shakespeare, by the by, was fantastic. I've seen Taming of the Shrew staged and directed a number of different ways, but this one absolutely took the cake. We were in stitches throughout.)

After three weeks in this city, I was all ready to categorize DC summer weather as follows: hot-and-sticky, hotter-and-sticky, hotter-and-stickier, and so-sticky-I'm-not-sure-how-hot-it-is,-but-it's-pretty-hot. Know how it feels when you take a shower and forget to put the fan on? That's DC pretty much all summer, regardless of the outside temperature. You step outside, you drip. Pretty much a done deal.

But no! I left the house this morning to find it dry(ish) - and 64 degrees! Fahrenheit! It's not quite my New-England-girl-preferred temp of "cold enough for your boots to squeak" (around 20°F) but hey, it's a start.

Lest I think DC and I were going to suddenly drop all hostilities and make friends, recent events have conspired so that I can no longer access the internet from my house. (Technically, this has less to do with DC as a city and more to do with our Comcast account having expired, but it's fun to place blame on amorphous urban poltergeists.) So while I'd love to upload pictures of my neighborhood or my snazzy lime-green walls... you'll have to wait until the end of the week for those.

And in the meantime, there's work! So much work to be done. Half of my office is currently either on vacation or attending conferences in Ghana or Kenya or Burundi, so my life as a working-girl is never over.

Enjoy your week!

This past Monday's New York Times magazine did an in-depth feature article on how women will play a key role in international development, with some interesting recommendations for foreign aid programs based on their findings. It also contains more information about microfinance and its links to women - many of MFO's programs are in fact targeted at women, for many of the reasons the article brings up.

The feature was adapted from the forthcoming book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which I'm looking forward to. You can read the article in its entirety on the NY Times site here, and I would definitely suggest you take a look.

Today was the one-week anniversary of my first day of work (whee!), so I thought I'd post a few more details about the job itself. Is it any coincidence that this is organized in bullet form? Nah, I make bullet-point lists like it's... well, my job. Which it is.

• Job title: Project Assistant, Financial Education


• Organization: Microfinance Opportunities
  


• What exactly is "microfinance"?: Microfinance, broadly speaking, is the creation of financial solutions for the developing world, with the goal of empowering people to lift themselves out of poverty.

• So what does MFO do?: We are a "microfinance resource center" - we are involved in financial education, market research, and some work with microinsurance (which is insurance against a very specific risk - for example, crop failure - that is affordable for someone at the poverty level). I work for the financial education team - the people who develop, market, and disseminate our financial education curriculum. The curriculum is targeted at people at or around the poverty line, and we train hundreds of people around the world to teach it every year. (For more information, click here.)


• What does your job entail?: A whole mix of things. I'm responsible for some administrative tasks like answering the phones, handling curriculum sales and requests for information, ordering supplies, keeping our databases current, etc. I make lists every day because the range of things I'm responsible for at any given moment is so vast. I also do a lot of logistical work - organizing training conferences overseas, booking travel, shipping things to faraway places... I made a phone call to Kenya last week. I also do just about anything else our two training officers and the rest of the MFO team need me to do - proofreading documents, taking inventory, coming up with ideas for keeping things in order... just about anything that needs doing.
  


• What does it feel like to place a phone call to Kenya?: Sadly, it feels exactly like calling someone in Kentucky. Or someone in DC who lives on Kentucky Avenue. I was kind of hoping to hear the Indiana Jones theme playing in the background, but alas.
  


• What's your favorite part of the job thus far?: It has to be the people I work with - we're a very small organization and everyone I've met so far is smart, passionate, funny, and genuinely a pleasure to be around. Much like when I interned with the State department, pretty much everyone at MFO has traveled and lived abroad, often extensively, so there are a lot of cool stories, funky jewelry, and respect/admiration for other cultures and ways of life.
  
  And they pay me! It doesn't get much better than that.

This morning I went for a run around the US Capitol building, and felt compelled to stop and say "Good Morning, America!" as I passed the National Mall. The sheer wonder-filled absurdity of this city just can't be captured in words, and I promise many pictures to come. But for now, I leave you to help one of my roommates put his IKEA furniture together. He's not Swedish, see, and we Swedes have this traditional ritual called Assembling Pieces of Particleboard With Allen Wrenches. And I would be a very poor Swede indeed if I didn't pass on the secrets of our craft.

And so it happens that I have a home in DC.

Brita and I drove down today (eight and half hours with one stop, at one point averaging 28 mpg, no traffic except for accident slowdown about 60 miles north of Baltimore) and found parking on my street, found our parking pass in the kitchen, moved my things to an empty bedroom (which is not mine, but we'll switch things around soon) and I am here.

I have a job at a nonprofit called Microfinance Opportunities (microfinanceopportunities.org) which is mostly administrative, but it should be interesting nonetheless. I have a metro pass. I have full bookshelves, a camera, and infinite curiosity.

Feels like a very good beginning.