Flying Out: Lima

I am at DCA waiting for my flight to Houston.  In Houston I will connect to my flight to Lima.  It is pretty simple; I fly 3 hours to Houston, then 7 to Lima.  All told, it is a pretty easy flight route.  It certainly beats the 24 hour slog to East Africa, though I do miss the the frequent flier miles from those trips to Uganda and Kenya.  I also miss the chance to pop out of the airport in interesting and new places like Doha, Dubai, Amsterdam, among others.

I am headed to Lima for a week for work.  It is definitely going to be a busy trip.  There are a lot of important meetings, looking to move work forward for the next few years.  I am hopeful that my contributions this trip will amount to more than smiling and nodding.  I mean, I was brand new for the last trip, and would not have had much to add, but still.  I would like to speak.  Speaking is an attainable goal.

This morning I woke up at 7 to work out.  It was cold, grey and raining outside, but I did it anyway.  I felt like I was achieving something laudable by exercising this morning.  Just by getting out of bed I had basically patted myself on the back just for being awake.  I jogged a couple of miles in the rain, irritated that it was raining.  I came back and made a breakfast of toast and yogurt, then got ready.  Naturally, since it was 48 degrees outside, the heat in our apartment was auto-turned up to 80.  So I was sweating in the apartment after showering--probably more than when I was running in the cold rain.

I have come to accept that I will sweat when I get ready.  Even if I give myself 4 hours of leeway for getting to my destination, I will still sweat because I am alive and thinking.  That means that I just know I will sweat to the airport.  Every trip, pretty much ever.  So you are welcome future seatmates, I will be sweating next to you for a least the first 30 minutes of the flight.

Now I am here and I can hear the United staff trying to lure 11 people off this flight with $500 vouchers and a promise of a later flight out.  This always seems to happen when I cannot change my flight at all.  It is a total bummer.  But I am going to go see if there is anything they can do to still get me to Lima tonight and change my flight.  If they can guarantee that, I would for sure take $500.  We shall see!

Keep traveling!

Update and New Things

New job.  New jobs are tough.  I have only been at this one about 8 weeks, and I feel like I am just starting to know what questions to ask, when to ask them, and why I should ask them.  The next step is knowing what to do with the responses.  I catalog them in various ways.  I scribble them into a note pad, then I type them.  Then I look through them again.  They strain through my consciousness as though my brain were cheese cloth. I know I retain something but what is it that passes through the fine mesh?  That is the next next step--I need to figure out what I don't know I am not retaining.

Good people at this new job.  I love working with the Forest Service.  It is a totally different atmosphere than VE.  I miss my VE friends and family dearly, but I am excited to be in a new venture.  International Programs at the Forest Service sometimes has the feel of a start-up.  It is frenzied, fast-paced, high demand, and involves a lot of marketing and relationships.  Then sometimes you run into the standard government barriers: i.e. 3 weeks to get fingerprints to and from the FBI so I can get an ID badge with a chip that will allow me to log onto my computer outside the office.  There is a lot of papeleo that I am learning to process.  I have to be both flexible and detail oriented; I am standard form driven and able to improvise--or at least that is the goal I am shooting for.  In any case, it makes for an exciting work place.  Many of my colleagues are former PCVs and thus know the realities of living abroad for several years on end.  Many have lots of development experience, and love IP for its ability to eschew some of the rhetoric fatigue and get down to solid programming.  It is a very cool place.

I am loving living with Lee.  It has been the rightest move I have ever made.  I love to know what she thinks, what she does when she thinks she isn't doing anything at all.  I love the routines and the new types of adventures.  I love 9:00 pm after work when we decide to go to Mexico City for the hell of it.  We can, we do, we are learning together what works.  It is pretty remarkable.

All the while, DC is cooperating too.  The weather has not turned its back on us yet.  It is a bit of an Indian summer with warm temperatures, soft breezes and pleasant attitudes.  I love re-learning a place, and still having solid friends around with which to accomplish that task.

Certainly there are moments when I catch myself staring off and thinking of Uganda.  I miss it.  I miss the light there, I miss the smells.  I long for easy evenings on the porch with the dog and the donkey.  I even miss the loud neighboor up the street with his loud parties that I still was never invited too.  I miss the thrum of music, the whine of boda bodas, and the orchestrated semi functional calamity of the place.  Every day brought something unexpected and outside my frame of reference.  I think I feel that space in my day to day at times.  I don't need to go back right away, but it feels nice to think about it.

I was just in Chicago and New York, and I am headed to Peru at the end of this month.  I will certainly write between now and then.  And I hope to update from Peru this trip, too. The last trip was too busy to take time to write from there.

So, I guess all this is to say that I am happy and I am grateful.

More soon.

Keep Travelling.

Hitting the Gym...Sort Of

Since being back in DC, I have been so happy to get to go running a lot.  The weather has not always cooperated up to this point, but now as we move towards May, things are only looking up.  The trees are getting leafy, the flowers are out, the weather is consistently not angrily blowing sleet directly and personally at me while I run.

Running is lovely, and with Meridian Hill Park across the street, there are great stair sets I can run.  However, I have been wanting to find a gym where I can also lift weights.  I don't want to get ripped, just more fit and strong to help my running and tennis game.  I want something like this ideal body.  So, I have begun the gym hunt.  Fortunately for me there is a YMCA a 5 minute walk from our apartment.  It seemed like a good place to start.  I think of the Village People happily costumed and festooned in flamboyant sequined headdresses touting the benefits of such an affordable, supportive place.  This Y is a little different.

I walked in the Y in the brand new renovated building.  The lobby of the Y opens directly into Sweet Green.  For those of you who know DC, that should set off some warning bells.  For those of you who don't, click here.  It is a great place.  I was greeted by a woman who handed me a form to fill out.  She asked me why I had been so lazy and never showed up before.  Okay not really she asked if it was my first time in, and that she would set me up with a tour. 

After filling out the form, Chris, a young, fit black man came over to me and said "LOOK AT ALL MY MUSCLES! WHY DO YOU EAT SO MUCH CAKE? HAVE YOU CONSIDERED PROTEIN POWDER?" And after my brain's self judgement filter switched off, I realized he actually introduced himself and offered to show me around.  The gym was beautiful, not like any Y I had seen in the past.  It was full of young 20-somethings and early 30-ers, mostly white or ethnically ambiguous enough to be hip and nonthreatening to the general populous, and wearing designer workout clothes.

He showed me the ecomill treadmills that are powered just by running, no electricity (why not just run outside?) and the 4 types of elliptical machines and 3 types of stationary bikes.  It was all over whelming.  So many bodies moving in a poorly timed ballet, in sync but chaotic.  It was overwhelming.  Behind the cardio floor was the pool and the weights were below us.  It was new and clean and modern.  The locker rooms were spacious with nice showers, saunas, and steam rooms.  It was all very good.  At the end of the tour he said, "So I hope you feel pressured enough by all these young bodies to buy a membership immediately!  Thanks!"  Then he directed me to the same woman as before who asked about my laziness.  She smiled sweetly and explained membership options.  I told her I would have to talk to my girlfriend about it first.  She nodded her understanding and said, "alright then, enjoy quitting before you get started this evening!"  Then I used my free day to work out.

I think I will get used to all these things again.  But the gym just seemed like a lot.  And it seemed funny to walk outside to exercise inside after not doing that for two years.  And all those aggressively fit and nicely dressed young people were intimidating!  So many yoga pants!  But I can do it.  The gym search continues, and in the meantime, I will be out for a run.

Washignton, DC Part 1

I am finally sitting down and having some time to write on here for the first time since being back.  I have been back a total of 12 days.  In some ways it seems like I have been here a lot longer, in some ways, the time is very short, and I feel like I just arrived.  Either way, it is not that long, and musing over the actual perception to reality difference is a bit too meta to really be interesting.

I arrived on Tuesday the 17th on a 15 hour flight from Dubai.  It was rather unremarkable.  I slept a lot, I ate 4 times, and watched a number of movies.  When I arrived, customs and immigration was the quickest at Dulles that I have ever experienced.  It took less than 45 minutes to go through immigration, gather my luggage, and pass through customs.  It was refreshing.  Usually, because of the ineffective way Dulles shuttles people from the international terminal to the main airport terminal, there are bottlenecks that are frustrating and interminably irritating after traveling from far-off parts of the world.  Luckily, I was greeted on the other side by the smiling face of Winnie Auma, our Uganda country director and my good friend from Village Enterprise.  By brother picked us from the the airport, and we began a crazy day.

My brother treated us to lunch a local diner, and I was thrilled to eat a delicious club sandwich.  Winnie ate biscuits and gravy for the first time (yeah I know, like the fattest American food, but it is legit).  Then we went to his house where we prepared for a meeting by having a skype call with Ellen in Uganda.  Then we took an Uber black car into the city, all the while I was deliriously pointing out monuments to Winnie.  This whole time I was g-chatting with Lee who did not know I was in the US, and I was pretending I was in Kampala getting ready to come to the US.  Surprises.

The black car dropped us at FHI 360 where we had a preparatory meeting for a presentation we would be giving on that Thursday.  From there we went to a meeting with the funder of our randomized controlled trial (impact evaluation) that is running on our program in Uganda.  We met Konstantin in Dupont Ciricle (I was afraid Lee would catch a glimpse of me in the circle like one of those tabloid photos of bigfoot) so I was trying my best to cover my face.  Winnie, Konstantin, and I went to the meeting and then we walked down to Konstantin's office where my brother again met me for the grand surprise!

Evan, Rebecca, and I all went to Kapnos in the 14th Street area of NW where Lee was waiting, none the wiser that I was going to be showing up with Evan and Rebecca.  It was so nice to see Evan and Rebecca pull up in front of Konstantin's office.  It was surreal to be in DC, and I had only been there for 9 hours at this point, but I was excited to see Lee's face.  We agreed that we would all walk into the restaurant, and I would come in last, somewhat hidden by Evan (I am easily hidden because I am dainty).

Evan and Rebecca walked in first, and they both said hi to Lee and hugged her.  She was beautiful in a floral dress, sipping a glass of champagne and absently thumbing through her hair.  I was last in line to say hello and at first she simply said "hey!" and then it set in that I was there, and not supposed to be there, and surprising her, and that I was there, and for the next 10 minutes she laughed, while crying, and just saying "oh my god."  It was a pretty spectacular reaction.  We had a lovely dinner all four of us, and then we went back for my first sight of OUR APARTMENT!

The apartment is lovely.  It is just the right size, there are tons of windows that throw beautiful light on every space, and it is so nicely decorated.  Lee worked hard and did an amazing job of setting the place up.  It is compact, but spacious, and not cramped.  It feels like our place, and it is such a comfortable, welcoming space.  The building is lovely, and directly across the street from Meridian Hill Park.  We are a close walk to the 14th Street strip, U street, Shaw, and Columbia Heights.  It is ideal.  We unfortunately did not even have time to do nothing and enjoy each other because we both had to work a lot.

The next two days were filled with meetings, conferences, presentations, and courting potential funders, and current partners.  But finally, over the weekend we had time to just be together.  It was amazing to know that we could go to dinner, and not feel like we had to go all the restaurants we needed to.  We could go out, stay in, go for walks, and not feel  like there was pressure to try to do everything all at once.  We shopped for the apartment, went out for tacos with a dear friend who I hadn't seen since Christmas, went to the National Zoo, and generally enjoyed being together with no hurry for the first time in two years.  We cooked meals, made grocery lists, and planned dinners.  It was such a nice thing.

On a cultural note, the grocery stores here are insane.  After coming from Hoima where there are 11 things to choose from.  The grocery store here just makes me stop in my tracks.  In 3 or 4 grocery trips, I have generally ended up with at least 7 random things (mostly cheeses or cheese products), and spent much more than intended.  The tropical fruits in the store are stupid expensive and not ripe, there are more cereals than anyone could possibly eat, I can begin to describe how amazing it is to have whole grain and health food options.  It is all overwhelming.  And, no one tries to sell it to you!  You just go and casually pick what you want.  It is overwhelming.

On another cultural note, everyone looks like me here.  I know that seems obvious, but there are so many white 20 somethings who have facial hair and preppy clothes in this area.  At the grocery store, the park, the bars, anywhere, there are so many of me around.  I never confronted either my sameness, or that I could be so different based on the context.  It is pretty amazing.  The crowds of people, cars, options, and general transition have led to a few panic attacks, but those have been manageable, par for the course I suppose.  Even if I am not actually dying, I feel like I am, and I think about how I could just be buried under varieties of cheese and hot sauce and suffocate under the pile, and then the panic seems all at once more tangible, but less threatening.  Cheese is a double-edged sword.  More on that later I s'pose.