Washington DC

DC in 48 hours and 4 photos

/ SallyJBrz / 2 Comments

My 48 hour business trip to DC, in four photos:

1. Business lady special breakfast. Aka left my hotel and took my laptop over to a fancy coffee shop near my client’s office, where I got an almond latte and a fresh-from-the-oven butterkuchen – perfect fuel for the five hours of meetings ahead.  
2. Chinatown by night, after a delicious and sweet dinner with a client (hi Laurie!) and coworkers. We’re all so rarely in the same place, it’s great to get together to hatch new ideas in person and toast to all our hard work in 2015.


3. Pearl Harbor anniversary wreaths at the World War II memorial on the National Mall. All the flowers were fresh from the service a few days earlier. I paused from my run to stroll and reflect, especially about my granddaddy, a Pearl Harbor survivor who never even got to see this memorial come into existence.


4. The view on my run up to the Lincoln Memorial. Even on these whirlwind trips, I try to get in one touristy or location-specific thing. On my last day, I took the metro down to the White House, ran on the mall, and took a taxi back to the hotel to get ready for work. It was glorious to be able to visit Lincoln with almost no one else there – the one Chinese family who let me take the photo so they could all be in it, the monument worker polishing the floor beneath the Gettysburg Address.


And that’s all in addition to the great food, the team karaoke competition that my friends ROCKED, the dozens of funny and useful conversations with my coworkers.

DC, you’re Definitely Cool. Looking forward to more adventures when I head back… next week!

 

1600 Pennsylvania Ave

/ SallyJBrz / 2 Comments

A woman’s place is in the House…
the Senate, and the Oval Office

aka

Sally goes to Washington 

Outside the West Wing

1600 Pennsylvania Ave – the place where history is made, the building the world is run from, the center of our executive branch, the house of the nation = my weekend entertainment.

Meg, a good friend from our days at Mount Holyoke College, made my day week year life? when she used her supreme power to score tour passes for the West Wing for Matt and me.  On an absurdly hot Saturday in January, I finally got to cross one major thing off my list when I picked up my security pass and strolled through the President’s place of work (and my future office?).

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Hot times in DC: Part 1

/ SallyJBrz / Leave a comment
Hey, Boston!  Did you miss me?  I was down in DC last week, visiting a special dude and hanging out with my awesome DC colleagues (I couldn’t wait another two weeks to see them at our work retreat!).  Despite the sweaty weather (September much?) and ridiculous amount of walking I did (negated by the delicious food I ate), I had an awesome time in our taxed but not represented capital.
I dare you to find something I didn’t do in DC last week, but at the top of the long list of the things we did do was visit the Spy Museum.  Ignore the critics – that place is awesome.  Overwhelming, but they stacked the coolest parts at the beginning so I didn’t so much mind being exhausted when  I got to the McCarthy era exhibit after 2.5 hours.
The best non-James Bond thing at the museum was this video, which I have already watched about five times.  Made for the Lincoln Museum, it shows the progression of the Civil War and its boundary disputes in just 4 minutes (1 second equals 1 week in history).  Check it out and prepare to be captivated.  For something so simple, it’s terribly moving – it gave me a new perspective on how it must have been to live in those times, on those borders.
[Check it out now, because every time I try to link here the video stops working!]