Ms Herlocker Goes to Washington: Week 2, January 22-28

My week began Sunday morning with an adventure around McPherson Square to find the church I would be attending, Luther Place Memorial. Luther Place is a really cool church. The building is completely different architecturally from the rest of the city; while everything here is either Greco-Roman style or modern high-rise style, Luther Place looks like many of the pictures I’ve seen of churches in Germany. There is a statue of Martin Luther out front, which in and of itself seems almost out of place in Washington DC, and the church is red brick with murals of human rights leaders on the outside alcoves. Inside there are many really cool stained glass windows, which I will eventually photograph, that have portraits of Protestant reformers (John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, Jan Huss, etc.) and church things (the Eucharist, the Ten Commandment Tablets, etc.) around the side and behind the altar there are stained glass portraits of Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Harriet Tubman. As a congregation, the church is very invested in human rights causes. They are completely welcoming to everybody, they have ASL translation during worship, and they have very strong Rwanda connections, specifically they have a sister parish… in Kirhe… and they know Pastor John Rutsinditwarne… and Bishop Mugabe… :) So, basically I tried to find Bethel.

After church I decided that I wanted to wander around the Mall, take pictures, go to the National Museum of American History, and have some alone time. I ended up spending four hours in Mom’s Museum slowly walking through every single exhibit, reading almost every word, and enjoying being surrounded by history. In the exhibit about the Presidency, there was a podium where a person could step into the president’s shoes and give one of three speeches: FDR’s “Only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” and Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” I waited until the room had sort of cleared and took to the podium, eloquently and quietly encouraging my fellow Americans to think about how they can contribute to the well-being of their nation. If elected, I would need to be trained in how to talk slower though. I was a bit faster than the TelePrompTer. :)

It was very cool to see all the exhibits and how they had been updated in the past 7 years. The First Ladies' exhibit was expanded and there were a couple different sections of the pop culture icons. The pop culture displays included the classics, like the original Muppets and Dorothy's slippers, and new additions, such as Apolo Anton Ono's speed skates from the 2002 Olympics and Farrah Fawcett's bathing suit from the poster.

After the museum, I made my way over to the Lincoln Memorial, stopping at the Washington Monument and WWII Memorial on the way there. At the Lincoln Memorial, I said "Hi" to Lincoln for Granny and counted that there are 59 steps from the ground to the top. And I have no idea what the significance of that could be or why I counted.

After Lincoln, which was, of course, way more crowded on Sunday than it had been in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I wandered around the area trying to figure out which Metro Station I needed to go to in order to get home. While doing this, it was getting steadily colder, but I visited the Korean War Memorial anyway since I was there and I hand’t realized how close they all were to each other. I think the Korean War Memorial is still my favorite of all the memorials I’ve seen (I’ve yet to go to MLK), and it’s especially eerie with a light crust of snow on the terrified soldiers just as the tendrils of dusk were starting to creep around the sky.

Eventually, I made my way to the Foggy Bottom Metro, where my phone had sent me. This was possibly the longest and coldest mile I had walked in a long time. But I made it home safely, stopping at Chipotle for dinner. You never really appreciate how good food tastes until you haven’t eaten much during the day and you just walked around in very cold weather for a couple of hours.

This past week at work was somewhat interesting. On Monday and Tuesday, I spent the day watching videos from the archives of the GFWC that were filmed mostly between the late 1980s to about 2003ish. One of the videos I watched was a discussion about the plans of the GFWC moving forward into the future, in which Betty Friedan was a guest. On Thursday, I spent the day on the floor organizing boxes of old issues of the GFWC’s magazine and making a spreadsheet with them so that on Friday I could spend the day checking which of the magazines need to be scanned and put into PastPerfect, which is a museum archival program. After I figured out which magazines still needed scanning, I moved on to setting up how they would be sold on the GFWC website.

In LCWS fun, on Tuesday night they hosted a viewing party for the State of the Union with free pizza, which was a really great event where I got to continue getting to know other people from the program outside of my roommates. On Wednesday, our field trip was to learn about a volunteer opportunity available to us at the homeless shelter behind Luther Place. It was very interesting, and I’m considering doing some of my hours there.

I’ve been bonding with my roommates this week through adventures to Trader Joe’s, movie watching, class, homework, and, of course, the universal bonding agent, food. This week Melissa was in charge of Wednesday dinner, but I ended up helping anyway by lending advice, which was fun. On Thursday, I decided to test out a super vegetarian meal idea I had had, and it was surprisingly successful. I had a quinoa, zucchini, and sweet potato frozen dish from Trader Joe’s, Quorn Chik’n patties (some sort of fake meat version of chicken breast), and a little tomato paste, I put them all together, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Then on Friday, on my way home from work, I picked up a half dozen hot glazed Krispy Kreme donuts for my roommates and me (as well as a paper hat each). For the final food fun of the week, on Saturday, I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. :)

This week has been really long and I can’t believe I’ve only been living here for two weeks. I feel really adjusted to living in the city, commuting, having an apartment, and living with a new set of people.

Ms Herlocker Goes To Washington: Week 1, January 14-22

After a long and arduous journey of two planes and a taxi ride, I had arrived in the River Place Apartment Complex in Arlington, Virginia. But the journey wasn’t over. After getting our keys from the LCWS Office, Evan and I had to walk all the way back across the complex to our building with our large, awkward suitcases.

In my apartment, I got my clothes settled and excitedly began getting to know my new roommates, Melissa, Becca, and Megan, ending the night with a wonderful viewing of Saturday Night Live, hosted by the fantastic Daniel Radcliffe.

The following day was further spent settling and getting groceries. It’s pretty convenient that Safeway is a few blocks up the street for when I want to get mainstream deliciousness like Milanos and Eggos. I think my favorite discovery though was that CVS (which is right behind the apartments) sells Honey Graham Oh’s in smallish boxes for only $1. Potentially the best value ever. We also had more Roommate Bonding watchingTangled and swooning over Flynn Rider/Eugene Fitzherbert/Zachary Levi.

Monday morning we made our way to the LCWS Office for Orientation. I’m not sure I will ever be oriented into another program in such a wonderful way. Except maybe Disneyland. Or the Dharma Initiative. What made this orientation superior to every orientation ever was that everyone was so sarcastic, which led to fun and hilarity. After orientation, my roommates and I went on an adventure to find where our internships are located. Because I don’t start at the Holocaust Museum until February 13^th, I am interning at the General Federation of Women’s Clubs for the time being. Due to my double internship and Megan having class, our group split at the DuPont Circle Metro Station and continued exploring.

Tuesday was the first day of our internships and so I got to jump right into commuter train traffic, scary tall escalators, and rushing to get to both of my internships, all while wearing a dress and rainboots. I was supposed to get my security clearance badging for the Holocaust Museum done that day but the person in charge of that wasn’t at the museum, so I have to reschedule. But the trip to the Museum was not a waste because my supervisor introduced me to the staff of the Museum. I am so beyond excited to start working there. Everyone is very friendly and I feel like I’m going to fit in just fine.

After leaving the Museum, I made my way across town to the GFWC Headquarters on N Street a few blocks from DuPont Circle. The neighborhood is really cute and the women in the office are very nice. I spent the rest of Tuesday, as well as Thursday and Friday, at Headquarters doing various sorts of archiving jobs, such as making a list of videos, watching and summarizing the videos (such as one of the previous presidents dressing up as women important to the club and a film for the centennial celebration with a killer soundtrack), and scanning old documents.

On Wednesdays we, as a program, go on field trips. To open the semester, we visited the Capitol Building and the Supreme Court. I had been to the Capitol before, so I mostly focused on the various statues of important Americans, such as one of my heroes, Jeanette Rankin. As a tour, it was really short and I wish we could have been able to see more of the Capitol Building, even going up into the scary Rotunda would have been cool. I guess since we went through so much security anyway, it would have made sense to me for us to be able to go to more places in the building. 

After the Capitol building the seven of us who are taking the American Heritage Seminar (more on that to come) needed to go to the Library of Congress so we could get our reader cards, which would allow us to use the Library for our research on that project. Sounds totally cool and worth it, right? Well, maybe on a different day I would have enjoyed it better, but I was already getting a little impatient, plus it was lunchtime, and everyone else in the program got to go explore the National Mall and get lunch while we took another tour and filled out paperwork. Using the library will be super awesome though, and I am actually quite looking forward to it. 

We rejoined the group at the Supreme Court and took a picture on the steps before going in. I, of course, got moved to the front for being short. Yay! Once we got inside the building we made our way through an exhibit about the history of the building before we got to go into the actual courtroom. Even though I was still hungry, I could’t help but be blown away by the thought that I was sitting in the same room where all the important court cases since 1935 had been settled.

Wednesday night meant the first day of classes and I’m really excited about my Wednesday class, which is a CINEMA CLASS. And the first film we’re studying is MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON!! YAY! Obviously, I think this class is going to be really great; my teacher seems to be pretty cool, my classmates seem to be pretty cool, or at least reasonable. Also, another cool thing about the class is that all four of us in my condo are in the class, so on Wednesday nights we make dinner for everyone. As the main cook in the apartment, I started off our semester with a wholesome meal of Kraft Dinner with hot dogs and peas, followed by brownies from Trader Joe's! Yum! :D

My second class is on Thursday nights, which is the American Heritage Seminar. That class is going to be interesting; we’re doing genealogical research into our families, so, even though there is quite a bit done for the Herlockers and Damms, having that already will be helpful for the paper at the end of the semester.

The week concluded with a small get-together in one of the other condos on Friday, a light snowfall, and dinner in Georgetown at the Tombs on Saturday night.

All in all, it’s been a pretty good first week in our nation’s capitol. :)

I'll embed pictures into this post once I figure out how to do that... for now, they'll be on Facebook! See ya next week!!