Manners, Mormons, and Everything Else

Happy Valentines Day! I had forgotten that today was even a holiday until I opened my bedroom door this morning and saw the beautiful sight of paper and chocolate down the entire length of the hallway. The fourteen boys at the Barlow Center had written anonymous notes to each girl and secretly placed them by the appropriate doorways along with bags of candy. Talk about a major ego booster and an excellent start to the day!
Everyone, for the most part, is nice in D.C., and not just the Barlow boys. When you eat with a group, no one takes a bite until everyone has food. I regularly see people give up seats on the Metro, and men are always opening doors for the ladies. It’s not awkward or chauvinistic like some people would assume- it’s just the way it is. There’s a sense of general etiquette in this city that I haven’t really noticed to the same extent in other places I’ve lived. Then again, I’m not driving here (not a day has gone by that I haven’t heard sirens or honking horns). I’ve heard horror stories of east coast drivers, but at the same time, I received comfort in the words of a stranger while crossing the street the other day. Amused by the fact that I was running across the crosswalk, a man asked,
“Are you not from D.C.?”
“I’ve been here for a month,” I replied.
With raised eyebrows, he said, “Then you should know that the cars will stop for you!” 
I forgot that I’m not in Utah anymore!

Returning to my etiquette tirade, here’s one more little story.  Last week I got lost in one of the passageways in the Capitol while looking for an elevator. I found a “Members of Congress Only” elevator, but recognizing that this particular option was off limits, I turned around to find a different route. At this point, a Congressman had come up behind me, and sensing my confusion, he let me ride up the elevator with him. Not only was this nice, but he also let me walk out of the elevator first when we reached our floor. So yes, even people in the government have good manners!

Last week was awesome in terms of my internship. I feel like I’ve been fully integrated into the office ever since I successfully played a prank on one of the legislative assistants with the encouragement of my supervisor. Now I feel very comfortable when it comes to laughing during lunch break, or randomly talking to people if there’s ever downtime. On Thursday, the Mormon jokes officially began, ranging from Amish to alcohol, but it was all in fun, and I really enjoy the people I’m working with.

Here are a few highlights from the weekend:

-Within 24 hours I was in the Capitol, the D.C. Court of Appeals, and the White House. How’s that for all three branches of government in one day? Friday morning I gave a Capitol tour to some of my Dad’s interns who were in town. Then, that afternoon, I attended a briefing by an appeals justice in the actual courtroom for the D.C. circuit. Fabulous! The next morning, a large group of us went on a tour of the White House. It was fun to go bowling with Barak-never thought I would get to do that! (Just kidding). But hey, at least we got to walk out of the front doors of the President’s residence! Random observations: There was a ball sitting out on the south lawn, and once we got outside, we noticed a butterfly decal in one of the windows-maybe Sasha or Malia’s doing?

Some of our group in front of the White House
Left to Right: John, Alexis, Sarah, Jesse, Keshia, Peter, Me, DJ, Winnie, Chris, Alison, Nate

-A group of us went to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and watched money being made-literally.

We don't love money- we're just kissing it goodbye!
Rachel and I at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing

-My friend Alison and I stopped by the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue. We’ve decided it is a secret treasure of D.C. There’s a great, relatively inexpensive food court inside, and then you can take an elevator up twelve floors to the top of the building’s bell tower. The view was incredible-even better than the view from the top of the Washington Monument in my opinion! And guess who forgot her camera? Yep-BIG oops!
-Several Barlow buddies and I went to a concert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It’s a beautiful building, just west of the Lincoln Memorial, and while it hosts the National Symphony Orchestra and other performance groups, there are free concerts every evening at 6 pm for smaller groups! I can’t believe we haven’t been taking advantage of this, especially when these concerts are a four minute walk from the Barlow Center! When we went, we listened to a violin-cello-piano trio, and it was awesome, and extremely relaxing. It made me miss my violin sooooooooo much!

Part of our Kennedy Center Group
Left to right: Nate, DJ, Hannah, Robert, Me, Chris, Megan

-I also made another stop at the Natural History Museum (I've gone three other times). I looked at the dinosaur exhibit, and then my friends (Megan and Alison) and I went to the rocks/gems gift shop on a different floor. We’ve been there before, but oh how we love looking at the rocks!
-And then, Saturday night, after everyone was burnt out, we watched National Treasure 2 and freaked out every time we recognized a street or a landmark from D.C. (which happened often)!

I’m still having a blast! When I’m not interning, sightseeing, or doing school (believe it or not, I am taking twelve credits right now, and don’t get me started on how badly I procrastinated my last paper), my Barlow friends provide an ongoing source of entertainment, good conversation, and out of control laughter. When nothing is going on, I’m generally trying to keep up with five or six games of online Scrabble that I’m playing with some of the overly-intelligent people here (in other words, I keep losing all of my games). We’re already dreading the end of the semester, and we haven’t even reached the half-way point yet!

Explosion at the Capitol

Okay, so the explosion didn’t actually occur inside the Capitol building. It happened at one of the House Office Buildings next door. (FYI: members of House do most of their work in these buildings and only go to the Capitol to cast votes in person.) Here’s the story:

There was once a lovely intern who decided to be proactive by restocking the mini fridge in the backroom of her office with water, lemonade, and “soda” (people don’t say “pop” in D.C.).  A split second after the intern grabbed a can of lemonade out of its box on the top shelf, the rest of the cans decided to come crashing down, which of course created an embarrassingly loud sound. If that wasn’t bad enough, two of the cans received severe puncture wounds, and the lemonade sprayed all over the room.

That was the explosion.

And yes, I was obviously the lovely intern. The best part about humiliating myself was when I proceeded to clean up the mess. I looked under the little sink in the back room and luckily found some Clorox Disinfecting Wipes just waiting for me. But wait, what was the scent of the wipes? LEMON. Life is just a little too ironic sometimes.

I really can’t say a ton about my wonderful internship online, but here’s one observation I am willing to share. Acronyms are everything here. What on earth is the Department of Defense? Oh wait! It’s the DoD. And apparently “Capitol Visitor Center” is simply too much to say in one breath, so we’ll call it the CVC. Then of course there’s the EPA, OGR, RHOB…

I guess we do this at BYU (Brigham Young University) too with the buildings on campus (HFAC, JFSB, SWKT)…Now that I think about it, I suppose it’s not entirely unique to have acronyms all over the place. So why do I even bring this up? Because one day, someone at work asked me if I could run over to the CPK with him so he could run inside while I sat in the car and prevented any lurking cops from giving him a ticket for parking illegally. What was the CPK? California Pizza Kitchen- the restaurant. And now I feel entirely ridiculous because I just Googled “CPK” out of curiosity, and “California Pizza Kitchen” was the first thing that came up on the screen. Apparently I’ve been oblivious to the whole acronym over-usage thing until starting my internship.

Speaking of my internship, I regularly walk home, and on one occasion, I took pictures on the way back. These are sights I get to see every day, and they still take my breath away!

Treasury Building

On a different note, this week has been great! I had good experiences every single day including excellent workouts, lectures, sight-seeing experiences, and excursions with friends!

Like my internship, I’m not technically supposed to say a lot about the speakers from my Friday class (what they say is “off the record”), but after one guy talked to us about the economy, I wanted to either live in a hut in the mountains with my own garden, or add a ton of money to my retirement account. A word of advice to everyone, including people my age: you need to start an IRA or 401-K account NOW. It will be worth whatever you need to sacrifice for a while to get it going.

 I also learned from a different speaker that if you want to join the FBI, you need a bachelor’s degree and have to apply between the ages of 23 and 34. Oh, and based off of another briefing, I’ve decided that being a natural disaster reporter sounds like the coolest job in the world!

After class on Friday, a group of my Barlow buddies and I went to Ford’s Theater, where Abraham Lincoln got shot. Below are pictures of the outside of the building and of the balcony where the tragedy occurred.

And this may be showing an extremely sick side of my sense of humor, but I just had to take a picture of this sign when I walked in the theater doors.

An interesting fact about this theater is that there are still performances that happen here on a regular basis.

After going to the theater, my friends and I did the only thing a group of BYU interns could possibly do on a Friday night: get on the metro and eat dinner…at Costco. It was so much fun!

Yesterday (Saturday), I spent some more time at the American History Museum and saw the First Ladies’ Dresses exhibit. The dresses below are the ones that Nancy Reagan and Michelle Obama wore at their husbands’ inaugurations. 

I also saw C-3P0 be standing in the hallway.

Once again, I wrote too much, and the frustrating thing is that there are so many other things I could go on and on about. But I won’t. This is enough. But before I forget, here is what the Washington Monument looked like yesterday! It was partially covered up by clouds!

D.C. in a Nutshell

A month ago I decided to start a blog about my semester here in Washington D.C., and guess what? I'm finally starting the blog. In my defense, I have been so busy meeting new people and crossing things off of my D.C. Bucket List that whenever I have downtime, I usually plant myself in one of the commons areas in the Barlow Center and talk with whoever is around. It's funny-I was so excited about coming out here that I didn't really foster any worries about uprooting myself until the night before I got on my plane. That's when I fully realized that I was leaving behind an incredible life at BYU (shout out to my friends and roommates in Provo!), and my comfort zone of being with my family in Puyallup. Ironically though, I have once again been blessed with incredible friends, and it's so weird to think that last month I didn't know most of the people that I spend all of my time with now.

I'm not going to go on a billion-paged rampage of everything I've been up to, but here are the highlights and general observations of my first month here. I promise my future updates will be more experience and event-based!

Where I Live: The Barlow Center:

BYU owns this building, and it serves as housing for about forty Washington Seminar students. There are four main floors- the first floor is where the "Great Hall" is located. We have class in this room on Fridays, and then FHE and institute are both held here on week nights. The second floor is home to several church offices, and there is also a small library for us to use. The third and fourth floors are identical, but the third floor is designated for the boys, and the fourth floor is for the girls. Each floor has a commons area consisting of chairs, couches, a TV, and a kitchen. We spend most of our time hanging out in these areas. There is also a game room in the basement that holds ping pong, air hockey, and pool tables, a piano, and another TV. The bedrooms are fairly large- two people live in each one. We share a fridge and microwave, and we have our own desks and closets. There is also a bathroom for each set of roommates. It's so much fun at the Barlow Center- it's kind of like having thirty-five roommates because I see these people every day! We've established three different dinner groups, and this has been amazing because we get to eat good food almost every night! With that said, here's a random side note: I've been strangely obsessed with peanut butter lately, and I doubt I've ever eaten so many loaves of bread in three weeks before!

Here's a plug for visiting D.C.: All of these things are FREE

Places I've been:

Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, WWII Memorial, and the outside of the White House: We knocked these out on the first night

Capitol Building: Gorgeous, symbolic, and I CAN GIVE TOURS!
Library of Congress: There are actually three different buildings (Madison, Jefferson, and Adams-go figure), and I got to go into the beautiful huge reading room featured in National Treasure.

Natural History Museum: Just imagine dinosaur fossils, diamond exhibits, a forensics lab, and MUCH more!

Air and Space Museum: Incredible pictures of space, and lots of famous airplanes and pieces of spaceships

American History Museum: An in-depth War Exhibit, Lincoln's top hat, Dorothy's ruby slippers- I still have a lot to see here

National Gallery of Art: Lots of original paintings from all over the world-I'm not even an art person, and I loved it!

Botanical Gardens: AKA the Modern Garden of Eden in my opinion

Jefferson Memorial

Vietnam Memorial

Holocaust Museum: Really sad, but incredibly educational. Everyone should go here.

National Geographic Museum: Lots of cool pictures from all over the world.

National Archives: The original Declaration of Independence (I'm going to steal it!) and the Constitution. The Declaration is actually extremely faded out and super hard to read. I asked a security guard why there was such a difference in the preservation of this document versus the Constitution, and apparently it was exposed to too much sunlight throughout its life.

National Cathedral: Amazing architecture, both inside and out. The acoustics are great, and the stained-glass windows are breathtaking!

Transportation:

Metro, bus, and excessive walking

Let me just say, I am an expert metro-customer now. The nearest stop to the Barlow Center is a 4-minute walk away. It's such a cool system! There are five different lines, all color-coordinated. I knew I no longer looked like a tourist when a random person on the street asked me where the nearest metro station was. I take it to work every morning, and then occasionally on the weekends whenever we're going somewhere out of the way, or we're simply too tired to walk anymore.

So far, I've only taken the bus to get to church. Speaking of which, it takes FORTY MINUTES to get to and from church every Sunday, which is SO different from any other place I've lived! I'm definitely not in Utah anymore, but I actually like putting more effort into practicing my religion, so take that for what it's worth.

And yes, I walk everywhere too. On the weekends we usually trek over to the National Mall to see the museums, and lately I've been walking home from work every day too (unless I'm making food for my dinner group, or a blizzard is going on outside).

Stores (for grocery purposes):

I usually just go to Safeway and Trader Joes. Target is actually one of the most inexpensive places to get food, but it's kind of a long metro ride to get there. I always walk to the other stores. Oh, and apparently CVS Pharmacy has taken over the world- it's an east coast version of Walgreens, and it's everywhere!

That is more than enough for one blog entry- I'm sure I find this way more interesting than anyone else, but hey, this is my life! With the background information out of the way, I won't have any qualms about including the funny, random stories that I'm experiencing all of the time, so stay tuned!