Candied apples at Los Angeles’ rather fabulous Farmers Market complex.
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The Washington Monument, pictured on a day when the National Mall was not overrun by the tea party movement like it was over the weekend.
People have been like, “why aren’t you blogging?” The response to that is that I have been super busy and stressed. Things are working out now, but I am going to have so much reading for grad school, so I probably won’t get to blog as much as I would like during semester…
I haven’t really done a lot of touristy stuff in DC yet, but I did walk down to the Washington Monument the other week. It’s the world’s tallest obelisk and tallest stone structure. It’s the tallest structure in Washington and it used to be the tallest structure in the world until they built the Eiffel Tower in Paris (it was all uphill from there…). It’s cool. It didn’t bowl me over or anything, I wasn’t all “wowzers, now that’s an obelisk, people!” because I haven’t really visited many obelisks in my travels. But it honors someone important (George Washington) who said and did a lot of important and interesting stuff (like revolting against the British colonizers, being the first president of the US, etc).
It’s also in the National Mall, which is so familiar from seeing images of protests and major historic events like Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement… but wow, it’s really huge. It’s hard to grasp that until you visit even just a part of it. I really want to get down there for some kind of event or rally while I am here, because the energy must be amazing.
Just across from the Washington Monument stands the National World War II Memorial. It was opened by then President George W Bush in 2004. This stone stands at the front.
There’s food for thought in DC no matter where you stumble… its not just found in class readings on post-conflict states etc. I’ll try and keep my education here well rounded, but I will have to always give some degree of preference to my grades…
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Washington DC is one of the only places in the world where educated people come to spend their summers being exploited. The city would crumble without free labor.
When one of our lecturers said this the other day at orientation (not a direct quote, but this was the gist of it), we all laughed. Then people immediately began firing off questions about how to get internships and how to get in before students from the rest of the country (and world) flood in for the summer internship season next year.
It’s one of the reasons I’m here. It’s one of the reason the baby faced college kids in oversized dress pants or little pencil skirts and knitted cardigans are here.
One thing that has struck me quickly about DC is that so many people are here to do something big or to change things. I’ve been going to a lot of open houses in the last week (the housing market hell here is deserving of a separate post), and I’ve met Capitol Hill staffers, researchers working on cancer breakthroughs at the National Institutes of Health, grad students galore, people who have started their own non-profits, staffers from international organizations, embassy types, journalists, documentary producers, arts administrators, education policy analysts and more.
It’s where the driven come to push even harder. Even the conversations you hear on the Metro are not the usual. Policy debates, arguments about post-Maoist China, all loosened by an after work beer or glass of wine at one of the city’s hip bars.
When you think of Washington DC from the ‘outside’, the first things you likely think of are the big monuments, the television show “The West Wing” and Obama. They are all there (apparently… I haven’t had a spare moment to go see them yet). You might also think about how DC was once known as the murder capital of the US (that’s improved a lot, but there are still some pretty sketchy neighbourhoods). But behind all that there are streets filled with charming rowhouses, huge lush green parks, farmers markets, funky cafe and restaurant strips and kids going to school in yellow schoolbuses (yes people, that’s not just a TV thing). There’s a diverse multicultural population. There’s a whole real, very interesting city.
Perhaps one of the things that has most surprised me here in DC though is that the people are friendly. I wasn’t expecting a mean city or anything, but usually in a hypercompetitive city, people are a bit more guarded, a bit more rushed. Compared to say, London (sorry London), this city is super super friendly. Perhaps it is because a lot of people are here trying to work for the public good, rather than purely commercial gain. Perhaps its because networking is king in this city and you never know who might be sitting next to you on the bus. Or perhaps its because Washington DC is not an offensively large city (the district’s population is only 599,657, however there’s about a million people in here on a workday, according to Wikipedia). Anyway, its nice.
I feel like this is a city where I will never have enough time though, especially since I only have two years for school, internships, networking, learning a third language (either French or Spanish, I haven’t made the final decision yet). Time will fly here but I think I will enjoy it a lot.
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My first American food post and my first post about Washington DC!
Here goes.
Even though I’m mostly preoccupied with househunting at the moment, I have been eating. Some of it has been purely for survival i.e. sandwiches from 7-11 (I really need a house so I don’t have to eat this stuff!). But I’ve managed to have a couple of good meals here and there and some ‘American’ food.
The other day when I was down around the Dupont Circle, a very cool area of DC, I decided to grab a burger at Five Guys, a chain that I had read about in my research before moving here (I seriously researched EVERYTHING I could about DC over the last couple of months).
This chain started out big in DC and then spread across the country. Obama has even been known to drop in! The main reason I went in was because there was a line, and anyone who eats street food or anything like that knows that lines mean good food!
You may be wondering what can be so special about hamburgers or hot dogs or all those other American foods that have been exported around the world. And yeah, I’m sure a lot of it is pretty substandard. You always hear bad things about American fast food culture yadda yadda, but I think that the worst stuff is the food that has been packaged and corporatized (is that a word?) to the point where it is actually devoid of culture. Some of the burger joints and fast food places here just ooze culture, and they tend to be the ones that sell fast food that is less manufactured and icky (but still in mindblowingly huge portion sizes, which I will write about later. But let me just say, generally an Australian ‘large’ size is smaller than an American ’small’ size!)
Ok, not sure if that stuff about culture makes sense, so let me try and explain more. At Five Guys, and some other places like it I have walked by or seen, getting a burger is almost like a performance. There’s a special way to order… you don’t just ask for the lot, there’s all this lingo that goes along with it. For example, here you order your hamburger “all the way” if you want all the toppings. The fries come cajun or ‘Five Guys’ and the orders are shouted out through the kitchen, like an elaborate sing-song. All this still goes on despite the busy shop having electronic ordering systems. It could be redundant, but its kept up, it’s all part of the show.
Calls go back and forward “two fryyyy, cheeburger all the way… two cajun, little burger”. It’s loud, punctuated by the crashes and thuds of the kitchen and backed by the continual hissing and spitting of the burgers on the grill. But there’s an entertainment factor too. “Cajun fries for the girl with brown eyes”…
I went to McDonalds here once in LA for breakfast and accidentally ordered one of the most disgusting things. A McGriddle… its sausage, egg (that isn’t made from real egg by the looks, rather a reconstituted egg white powder or something) and cheese inside two small pancakes covered with maple syrup. It was absolutely foul. I only managed a bite or two and you could taste the congealed fat. Just disgusting. It was served up in a lifeless manner as a queue of people just tramped in and out of the store.
There’s no culture to fast food like that. Maybe there used to be, a long time ago, but not now.
At Five Guys, there was a sign on the wall telling me that the potatoes used in today’s fries were from a farm in Illinois. There were also free peanuts! The fries, cooked in peanut oil, still had skin on them and were pretty tasty. A guy in the queue told me it was good to have them with vinegar… unlike in the UK and Oz, where we have chips with white vinegar and salt, here they used malt vinegar, which is such a different flavor, but good. The burger was pretty tasty… the meat didn’t taste processed or chemically. It certainly wasn’t healthy, with a big slab of meat and mayonaise and cheese on it, but at least it tasted real. I barely made a dint in the allegedly regular sized fries though. I don’t think even my food guzzling machine brother could have got through them!
Even though Five Guys is a big chain, it still had something a bit special about it. And that’s what I’ll keep my eyes out for while I’m here. So while I’m going to try not to go too overboard on junk in this fast food nation, I think there’s still some merit in exploring it a little. After all, I always try the local specialties wherever I go in the world…
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I’ve arrived in the states. I haven’t finished my Albury blogging or even my Indonesia blogging, but here I am in a brand new country! Whirlwind of wonder!
I spent a couple of days in LA and am now in Washington DC, where I will be living for the next two years or so (a fact that hasn’t really begun to sink in yet!)! I’ve had a good time so far, despite still being jetlagged etc. It’s super pretty up here in the northwest part of the city and I like that DC is big, but not offensively large. I think it will be a really good place to live and study.
I will write proper posts soon with pictures, right now I’m trying to organize housing and stuff. If you have a room in a house in DC near American University, tell me!
But a few observations so far…
1. No culture shock. America’s tourism ads should simply be “USA: As Seen on TV”. Everything, from going to the 7-11 to walking Santa Monica Beach has the strange feeling of… hmm this feels oddly familiar. But its also kinda cool 
2. Mexican food in LA. OMFG AMAZING. And in DC, I’m so excited about the range of cuisines available. Last night I had delicious Burmese food, a cuisine I have never eaten before!
3. People who hold Fox News-like opinions are real. They sit next to you when you are waiting for the bus and tell you about the Mexicans invading their towns and stealing their jobs and how its all Obama’s fault and then they propose some pretty extreme measures to solve this problem. People who don’t have access to proper healthcare are real too… they sit on the bus in LA and tell you and the super friendly bus driver (who didn’t make me pay my bus fare as her welcome gift to America) about how they waited all day at the overcrowded free clinic and only just got in to see a doctor in time and then got told that it was lucky they did, because that problem with their leg that they had ignored for a few days hoping it would just go away by itself because the rent was nearly due could have turned septic pretty quick and given them blood poisoning.
So, as much as America is “as seen on TV”, it’s an interesting show, and I’m pretty enthusiastic about being part of it all for the next few seasons.
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Waiting to go on stage
I spent about six days of the last week at the Albury-Wodonga Festival of Sight and Sound (formerly the Albury Eisteddfod), one of the biggest youth performing arts competitions in the region. Two of those days were spent volunteering, and the other four were spent screaming and clapping for my sister as she competed her little heart out against some extremely talented dancers. It was great to watch and it is an excellent opportunity for these kids to build their confidence and showcase their talents.
My sister Brittany looking gorgeous.
When I was a kid and a teenager, I competed in the eisteddfod every year in both speech and drama and dance sections, and some years I also competed in the music section (for flute) when there wasn’t scheduling clashes. While I was far more successful in the drama section, given that I was probably the fattest little dancer in town, I enjoyed competing in the eisteddfod immensely and people were always supportive and friendly.
But stage mothers do reign supreme at times. My mum, who is very used to being backstage at these events, takes a pretty laid back approach to it all and supports all of the kids and is super positive… for others, the level of competitiveness makes me wonder if they’ve mistaken this regional eisteddfod for the olympic games.
Mum makes some last minute costume adjustments.
There are always scandals, runs in tights, missing false eyelashes, ribbons coming off shoes, costume malfunctions and judging upsets. Nerves run wild and meltdowns or forgetting routines on stage are always a constant threat. But the drama is all part of the game. At the end of the day, its about what ends up on stage… beautiful performances, exciting performances that get the audience clapping and cheering and some kids doing better than they ever thought they could.
So I guess the point of this post is to say that getting out there and supporting the youth arts, especially in regional areas, is a really great thing to do. Even if all the kids on stage aren’t technically amazing at their chosen art, the confidence they could gain from having audience support could help them in so many ways in their lives… and you’d be surprised at just how good some of these kids are. The tickets are always affordable, so get in there and support them.
But just quietly, this kid was the best. Not that I’m biased or anything like that…
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Savoury scones from the famous Beechworth Bakery’s Albury store ($2.90… very delicious!). We also had a piece of bright red Jelly slice, straight from childhood birthday parties. It was like the bakery had directly imported it from the 80’s.
I didn’t end up getting the time to go down to the pretty colonial-era goldrush town of Beechworth, about an hour outside of Albury, to have scones or pies at the bakery proper during this stay (or get lollies from the great olde-style sweet store right next to the bakery), but thankfully their Albury store is just as yummy.
What better place to enjoy some scones than down by the Murray River in Albury, the scene for so many of those sugar fueled childhood birthday parties? The Oddies Creek Off-Leash Park is one of Pogo (our fluffy silly dog)’s favourite places in town.
But like most of our family though, when there is food around, Pogo isn’t interested in exercise.
He has very poor table manners. At home, he knows he’s not allowed on the table, but he didn’t feel those rules applied at the park.
This jumping style is how he got his name of Pogo. (The park is partially sealed off in the background because they are building a new playground area)
Once the scones were gone, he finally decided it was time to have a run. He’s a scaredy dog though and will only play with puppies his own size. If there’s a big dog, he won’t stray far from his sisters.
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A street vendor selling mie ayam noodles in Solo, Central Java, near the Karaton. Right behind the fence there was a paddock full of pungent goats who kept sticking their noses through gaps in the tarpaulin, trying to get some lunch from diners and making lots of noise when they were denied a meal.
Below is the product of this man’s labor. It was quite tasty, but I don’t really eat bakso (seriously, who knows what is in that stuff?) so I didn’t really touch those, only a little taste. But the rest was good.
But after a couple of mouthfuls… CRASH. A goat had stuck his head through a gap in the fence and knocked over a whole tray of vegetables. It was certainly a unique way to dine.
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