krakblog

Vacationing with Work

As promised, here's the latest from our travels. Nick and I spent 10 days at the end of April/early May in Washington, D.C. and southern Maryland. Oddly enough, it wasn't a REAL vacation - we were both there for work. I attended the Experimental Biology meeting in D.C., which ran Friday to Wednesday, and Nick needed to be down in Lexington Park at the Patuxent River Naval Station for work from Monday to Friday ... so we rolled the two together and made it a mini-vaca. (click here for more pictures)

We flew into D.C. together on Friday the 27th and got to spend two days together playing tourist around the city. We had some great meals, visited a pub called the Brickskeller which boasts over 1,000 beers by the bottle from over 30 countries, and (of course) made the touristy rounds. We saw a fantastic exhibition at the Natural History Museum featuring the best wildlife photography (I loved looking at the shutter speeds, aperture, and lens descriptions almost as much as the photographs themselves!). We hit the requisite Air and Space Museum, although we just stopped into the parts that had been redesigned since our last visits. This is the sculpture on the front steps of the museum - you can see it was a very overcast day.

We also headed out to the Eastern Market, an historic building that hosts butcher shops, fish markets, fresh flowers and produce, and vendors of every kind of handmade good and ware you could imagine. We ate lunch at Market Lunch (best known for its pancakes, although we were a bit late for breakfast). The crazy part is ... the day after we were there, it burned down. Pretty much gutted; last I heard, the fire was caused by an electrical problem (though Nick likes to insist that it was all my fault).

We spent a good part of Sunday at the Holocaust museum, a place that is so haunting and just covered in words: written testimonies, histories, and even the unspoken kind that have the most impact of all. Understanding how a society can be persuaded to turn its back on the kinds of inhumanity that make us believe that it could never be us ... the propaganda, the incremental lies, the ability of one charismatic leader to convince people that personal suffering and hate are natural bedfellows and one social group makes a pretty good scapegoat ... it makes us realize that we aren't as far removed from that German society as we like to think we are. I really think it's a place that every person should have to see, because its lessons extend so far beyond the Holocaust.

We took a loop around the tidal basin and saw the Jefferson Memorial and the Roosevelt Memorial, both of which also echoed some lessons that I think are lost on us today: Jefferson's writings on civil rights and the meaning of personal freedom, and Roosevelt's beliefs that Americans helping Americans is what makes our country great. I forgot how beautiful the Jefferson memorial is - I've only ever seen it in the summer, when it's mobbed by tourist groups who infiltrate by the busload. It's great to be able to spend time and actually enjoy the architecture and the writings.

We finished up our loop at the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II memorial, which neither of us had seen since its completion a few years ago. The WWII memorial was beautiful and symbolic, but perhaps not as poetic as the Vietnam or Korean Memorials. I found it so much more beautiful at night, when there were fewer people and it felt more haunted.

On Monday, Nick left for Pax River, and I devoted my days to sessions at the EB meeting. Monday night I joined some ladies from my program at UCSD for a great dinner at an Ethiopean restaurant (that was the second night in a row that I had Ethiopean). I'm addicted to injera, the sourdough flatbread that the meal is served on and that you use to scoop the food up with your fingers. I had another great night on Tuesday, when a graduate student from my field recruited some of us to go bowling (!) - many bloody marys later, I was throwing fast ones (okay, too many of them ended up in the gutter), and we were having a grand time. Science geeks having fun. What can I say.

After my poster session on Wednesday morning, I headed down to Pax River to meet up with Nick, which will have to be part II of this blog post, as it's getting late and I have a lot more to write!!