d.c.

hello to all my loyal readers! i hope you'll forgive my lack of posts lately; it's the result of a week of laziness and yesterday and today spent frollicking around the capitol. d.c. was pretty awesome, especially considering the government paid for my whole trip (except for the hamburger i ordered at midnight last night, dammit). while all of the monuments were incredible, as was getting to visit the offices of both california senators and meet with their top staffers, as was getting to meet some pretty goddamn amazing kids (ya'll think you're worried about ME? think about the family of the kid going to IRAN. or how about bosnia herzegovina? or tajikstan? yeah.), the MOST TRULY AMAZING PART OF THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE WAS..............

MY HOTEL ROOM.
i got a HUGE, luxurious room ALL TO MYSELF, and i felt so sophisticated and grown-up. i even ironed my blouse, because i felt like it was an appropriate thing to do in a grown-up room like that.

so let me give you a little context. some of you might remember the arduous boren scholarship application process, through which i really don't know how i survived, and others might know that i actually received this award. to sum it up, it's a scholarship awarded by the u.s. government to undergrads who plan to study in regions, and study languages, that aren't often visited/studied by students and that are deemed critical to national security. check it out, i'm on the list! -- http://www.iie.org/programs/nsep/undergraduate/2008scholars.htm

so the government (the dept. of defense, specifically) brought us all to d.c. and put us up in a nice hotel so we could have a reception ceremony and information sessions and meet each other and bla bla bla. last night at the reception table they organized the tables according to region, which was a pretty interesting means of deducing what regions america deems "critical." let's just say there were about 40 people crowded around the middle east table, and the sub-saharan africa table had 6. counting me. SIX. i guess the government doesn't really feel like a bunch of starving, aids-ridden africans are much of a threat. go figure.

then today we all had appointments to visit our senators (or, as was the case for almost everyone, their staffers) and congressmen. luckily there were about 20 kids from california, so that diffused some of the potential awkwardness. so we got to go to barbara boxer's and dianne feinstein's offices and talk to their foreign affairs staffers, which was pretty interesting. then i snuck away from the group and went to another building and crept around until I FOUND IT:

HILLARY'S SENATE OFFICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thank god no security guard saw me trying to take this picture, because i must have looked hella suspicious.

i also had some time to do some tourist-y stuff yesterday. i saw......

the capitol

the washington monument


the lincoln memorial (it was really breath-taking, so props to johnny for guilt-tripping me into walking all the way up to it, which i wasn't going to do because i'm LAZY)

a really, really creepy trail of some kind of animal poop leading all the way up to the lincoln memorial, and....

the white house, of course.

i'm wiped out. the bus ride back tonight took like an hour longer than it was supposed to because of traffic, so i was not a happy camper by the time i got back to ny. now i'm gonna crash.

but i think i'm going to make it a tradition of ending my posts with a cute, random picture from the ashley archives. today's pick:


me and johnny eating a healthy, homemade supper in some midwestern state on our road trip last summer.